The Rules Of Digital Photo Manipulation: Are You Confused ?

Children without hearing (deaf) work on their art projects at The National Rehabilitation Center in Vientiane, Laos.

Photo © John Brown All Rights Reserved

Remember when you were a kid and your teacher came to your desk to ask you what colors you wanted to use for your finger painting? When you became a bit older, you might have tried your hand at watercolor or used color crayons or pencils. Whatever the case, when it came to your own creativity, the sky was the limit.

Today's Wonderful World Of Photography

Flash forward to today's world. Digital photography has become part of pop culture and many photographers use editing gear. In fact, point #10 in a Photoshelter blog post regarding stock photography states flatly, "The image that came straight out of your camera is probably not good enough to be sold."

The photography tutorial goes on to say, "Today, it means Photoshop. That doesn't mean you need to manipulate the image beyond the point of recognition….but if the image is perceived as being professional, the price will be received as being reasonable."

The great stock photographers are mindful of this sage advice and sell tons of stock but news photographers and documentary photojournalists also have to do "what works."

Responsibilities of Photojournalism

That brings us to a subject that is being beaten to death and Dan Heller has written 2675 words on the subject of digital photo manipulation on his website in an article titled Digital Manipulation: Responsibilities of Photojournalism.

By now some people are probably aware of the Klavs Bo Christensen incident. In January 2009 Mr. Christensen was asked to deliver his RAW files from imagery he captured in Haiti for closer inspection by three judges who were assembled to select the winners of the "Picture of The Year" contest in Denmark.

Did Klavs Bo Christensen manipulate his RAW files "beyond the point of recognition?" Apparently people judging a photography competition in Europe thought so, for he was disqualified.

Confusion

This discussion is probably a bit confusing to photographers, especially when viewing other award winning photos. For instance, photographer Alice Smeets, a 21-year-old from Belgium, took the top prize with her photo of a young Haitian girl in the 2008 UNICEF "Photo of the Year" contest.

While I like the winning photo, its gradation somehow echoes Klavs Bo Christensen's Haitian palette. Smeets wins an international photo contest and Klavs Bo Christensen "sits and feels sorry for himself" after being labeled by some as what amounts to being a "cheater".

Did I manipulate the photograph of the boy above? Of course not. He sees a red sun and clouds of blue and who am I to tell him otherwise? I'm just happy I'm not a photo contest judge.

John Brown Photojournalist On LIGHTSTALKERS
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Is The Profession Of Photojournalism Going Up In Flames?

Photo © John Brown All Rights Reserved


In a May 27th, 2009 online article that appeared on The British Journal of Photography website, Jean-Francois Leroy, founder and director of Visa pour l'Image, an annual festival held in France dedicated to contemporary photojournalism, attacked photo agencies for "digging the profession's grave" by offering the media heavily discounted subscription schemes.

An arch-critic of newspapers' reluctance to publish or commission journalistic photo-essays, he claims discounting is only making the situation worse for photographers, who he says are finding the industry increasingly unsustainable. "Many agencies now have flat-rate schemes offering attractive prospects for magazines and newspapers run by people whose only goal is profit," says Leroy.

"By offering these subscription schemes, they are digging this profession's tomb. We scarcely need to cite the case of picture desks of magazines with the same profit-driven management demands, and which use amateur photo websites, paying one or two euros a shot."

These different practices, says Leroy, are becoming more widespread, and as a result, photojournalists are finding it almost impossible to fund more demanding, investigative stories. "This year, I can count less than a dozen photographers who have gone on a magazine assignment to do a real news report, allowing the photographer to make a living from his work and pay his bills at the end of the month," says Leroy.

The scarcity of such work has made it difficult to prepare his year's festival exhibitions, he says - the first time he's had such a problem in 21 years. Last week he unveiled the preliminary line-up, announcing 11 of the 30 exhibitions he has planned to stage at the end-of-summer event in Perpignan in southern France.

These shows include In Whose Name? by Magnum photographer Abbas - a seven-year project presenting contact sheets, work prints, mock-up layouts and covers of the Iranian's work shot around Islamic countries after 9/11.

Alexandra Avakian of Contact Press Images also focuses on the Muslim world. She spent eight weeks with Hezbollah, cheated death in Somalia and lived for two years in Gaza as part of her two-decade Windows of the Soul venture.

And away from the headlines, Agence Vu photographer Miquel Dewerer-Plana has spent months covering 'the other war' in Guatemala. In 2008, 6292 people were murdered in the Central American country, making it one of the most violent in the world.

Jerome Sessini, an Oeil Public photographer on assignment for Le Monde 2 and Le Figaro magazine, will show his "So far from God, too close to the USA" project, which looks at the violent gang war that is being waged a few miles away from US borders. The photographer spent three months in Culiacan, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, reporting on what the Mexicans call the 'narco insurrection'.

The festival will also host multimedia projects for the first time. 'We're not doing it because it's fashionable, but because it's about photographers' survival,' says Leroy.

Visa pour l'Image will present a series of evening shows dedicated to the past year's main news events. Professional Week runs 31 August to 6 September. For more details, visit Visa pour l'Image.

Of course, photojournalists know Jean-Francois Leroy's statements are more than "claims". Here's what another of the photo industry's good guys Allen Murabayashi, of Photoshelter, had to say about subscription programs: "Buyers desire more diversity, but convenience (aka subscription deals) triumphs this desire. The largest consumers of stock photography are often locked into subscription deals, which make it very difficult for them to consider alternate sources. Subscription deals are very bad for photographers, but great for business."

"…….but because it's about photographers' survival" says Leroy.

While people such as kidnapped Canadian photojournalist Amanda Lindhout fight for survival in Somalia, photo business executives eat fancy lunches on her dime. Welcome to the "War on Photojournalists" folks. It's being waged on several fronts.

VIDEO: David McGuffin talks to Amanda Lindhout's translator and former fellow hostage. (Runs 2:26)

John Brown Photojournalist On LIGHTSTALKERS
My Mondo Library Photography
My Photoshelter Photography Archive Homepage

GAIA Photography and Photojournalism

Photoshelter's Allen Murabayashi Tells Me Why Nobody Reads My Blog

Photo © John Brown All Rights Reserved

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The photo offers proof that I know a celebrity from the world of entertainment that has fun and enjoys parties and nightlife when I see one. Carabao anyone?

Photoshelter's Allen Murabayashi says I am probably already on my path to failure regarding this blog because nobody wants to read it, and no one is. He says there are two reasons for a blog:

1. A person has something so incredibly interesting and viral that people can’t stay away.


2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO).Allen says no one will ever care about this blog because I will never say something amazingly noteworthy. Moreover, I should write in a journal rather than post thoughts online. Ok, that's fair enough. Internet rankings and an examination of the stats back up that assessment. Although this blog's Alexa ranking has moved up 5,200,000 places in the past month or so, it's still mired in 4,806,417th place according to Technorati.com.

Furthermore, of the people who do visit, only 10% ever return. Clearly, very few people are interested in reading more of my brand of BS once they see it so Allen Murabayashi is right. Let's look at four topics people are staying away from.

1. Child laborer Chantal Srey Mao, 16, who was killed at Stung Meanchey Landfill in Phnom Penh, Cambodia a few months ago.

2. The rape and disembowelment of Lao Hmong women and children currently taking place in conjunction with an ethnic cleansing program being jointly conducted by the Lao and Vietnamese Armies in northern Laos.

3. A Cambodian woman stricken with breast cancer who faces death as a result of being denied access to a foreign funded NGO by the Cambodian government.

4. Sixty million people living in Southeast Asia's Mekong River Basin, some of whom will become victims of ecological damage while enduring human suffering due to hydroelectric dam projects.

Admittedly, these subjects are "incredibly uninteresting" to readers of this blog and that's backed by the fact that no comments were left regarding them. Allen is an intelligent man and he knows what he's talking about.

Ok. Ok. I get it! So what are more important subjects to YOU? Celebrities? Entertainment? Fashion? Film? Food? Football? Fun? Parties and Nightlife? Shopping? TV? Video? All of those words are among Technorati.com's "Top 100 Tags" relating to blogs.

The problem folks is those tags apply to people living inside the bubble of Western prosperity and some people just don't care about that bubble too much. It's not that I don't take notice of these pop culture topics, it's just that I want to diversify.

What does the tag "food" mean to those who have enough to eat vs. the 40% of the population in Cambodia that is malnourished? There is food for eating of course, but also food for thought.

How about "TV" and "video"? In a country where TV news is censored by the government but eighty percent of the people lack the electricity to turn a television on if they had one, that tag takes on new meaning.

In Galeano's words, "While society would draw and quarter us, disembowel us, cut us up into little pieces in order to fake an understanding of the human condition but in fact subdue us, what we really crave is to put the pieces together. We are what we do to change ourselves. We are daily involved in the struggle to reconcile the contradictions that bedevil us."

Therefore, Mr. Murabayashi, I'm going to continue to march along my path towards personal failure because the world's contradictions certainly bedevil me and "we are what we do to change ourselves", not our little blogs nobody is reading anyway.

John Brown Photojournalist On LIGHTSTALKERS

My Mondo Library Photography

My Photoshelter Photography Archive Homepage

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