I've been browsing this forum, from time to time, but this topic and what I see as some overly hard-line attitudes in this thread, have convinced me to de-lurk, at least for a moment.
I'll start by saying that I too believe the shots submitted by the photographer who triggered this discussion went outside the acceptable bounds of photojournalism, and fortunately did so ineptly enough to be easily detected.
But reactions suggesting "no digital alteration of any kind" as the standard to adhere to seem over-the-top to me. I've always taken something close to a view combining one or more of the following:
- Alterations should not generally go beyond those routinely made in the days of the wet darkroom
- Alterations should not add or remove picture elements of any importance to the original scene
- Alterations should not change the overall meaning of the scene presented
That would allow for a number of practices that seem unobjectionable to me. Cropping and re-sizing, for example, would fit easily within such guidelines. The same would apply to many changes to things such as overall brightness, contrast, saturation etc. and to adjustments designed to achieve results similar to darkroom dodging and burning techniques, the application of USM and the like.
I also think that different genres of photography could fit within such guidlines quite nicely. For example, in photography-as-art pretty much anything goes: plenty of outre techniques have been used in the past, and the scene to be presented exists only in the artists mind. In fashion photography, digital "airbrushing" is no different from the physical kind that seems pretty traditional there.
In the case of photojournalism, some darkroom practices of the past have been deemed acceptable, and others not. And I, for one, would be loath to insist on considerably greater restrictions on the digital darkroom than were ever imposed on the wet one (not that I have any great experience of wet darkrooms).
To my mind, that way lies absurdity. For example, if shooting in JPEG I can boost, say, sharpening by setting an in-camera parameter? Or I can set minimal (or in some cases no) in-camera sharpening and apply that in post-processing? It will be done better there (the computers on our desks having considerably more capability in some areas than those in our cameras). What makes the in-camera version "good" and the post-processing version "unacceptable"? Wouldn't such an insistence simply encourage manufacturers to build various (perhaps counter-productive) forms of in-camera processing, to end-run such "rules"?
If I shoot in RAW, what alterations am I allowed in RAW conversion? In the days of film, I could, say, "push" processing by a stop during development. Is that allowed in RAW conversion? Or am I limited to the defaults of my RAW converter? (That would make those defaults rather more important than they ought to be.) What about doing the equivalent by various adjustments to a JPEG?
An insistence on "no alteration of any kind" would, if pushed to the limits of absurdity, prohibit RAW conversion entirely and insist on an MD5-checksum verified in-Camera JPEG (or TIFF, or whatever) as the only valid photograph. Taking that analogy even further, it would be like insisting that film (aside from Polaroid) never be developed (for fear of chemical alteration in the darkroom).
I think that trusting your photographers, while insisting on strict but sensible rules and enforcing them is a much more productive approach. If some form of "trust, but verify" needs to be applied, provision of unaltered originals (perhaps using add-on "authentication kits") in addition to the "final" version of a shot might be justified if the problem were truly widespread. (I'm not at all sure it is, though such policies might be differentially applied to, say, staff photographers vs non-staff vs man-on-the-street sources.)
What I do think needs to be countered is the popular perception that any digital alteration of any kind is illigitimate and done with the intention to deceive. That is not so, but if the perception is allowed to take hold it may deny many of the highly useful aspects of digital photography to many of its legitimate applications.
...Mike