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Altered Reuters Photo


fotografr

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There was discussion here somewhere (can't remember the thread) about the recently discovered Reuters photos that had been manipulated. I thought some of you might enjoy seeing the photo that caused all the fuss. I think one of the more interesting aspects of this is that the alterations were so obvious and amateurish. You can see the clone marks all over the smoke in the altered version. Also, it looks to me like the guy just used the levels slider to make the smoke look blacker.

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I'll tell you that this Hajj fellow is now a laughing stock. How in the world did he pexpect to get away with this? What was he thinking? I guess he wasn't afterall...:(

 

Cheers,

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Brent; I caught myself wondering if this alteration I laughingly call a bould-be work in Photoshop is part of a larger scale, perhaps to fuel some story; perhaps a story I am luckily not aware of…?

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These pictures, and the various discussions of them, remind me of the Woody Allen story about two women complaining at a resort:

 

"The food is TERRIBLE here" - "Yes!, And such small servings!"

 

Was the guy fired for being unethical - or for being incompetently unethical?

 

The saddest part is, the smoke in the original was already pretty impressive without any manipulation.

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Lack of QC? You mean, they are not CMM L5 nor ISO9000/90001 certified? This puts their news into a new light. And the answer is 'No', I didn't talk about conspiracy theories.

 

I am sure you agree that Quality Control can be exercised in all spheres: Just the pride of delivering a quality product to clients. No certification is required. The consiracy theory allusion was in response to Bernd's wink. ;)

 

Cheers,

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These pictures, and the various discussions of them, remind me of the Woody Allen story about two women complaining at a resort:

 

"The food is TERRIBLE here" - "Yes!, And such small servings!"

 

Was the guy fired for being unethical - or for being incompetently unethical?

 

The saddest part is, the smoke in the original was already pretty impressive without any manipulation.

 

 

It's one thing to be unethical, you justifiably get fired for that, but adding insult to injury by being so incompetent and thinking he would fool people is just icing on the cake.

 

Cheers,

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Note: if this shot had been made on film and then scanned for digital transmission (which is how pictures have "moved" on the wire services for 15 years) - it still could have been Photoshopped anytime after it was digitized.

 

Nat. Geographic had a "modified picture" scandal as far back as the 1980s - from a Kodachrome original. Horizontal shot of a silhouetted line of camels beside silhouetted Pyramids. Someone wanted to use it as the cover shot - so they "moved" the camels to be in FRONT of the pyramids to fit the vertical format.

 

No one noticed until the photographer got back in town and pointed out he had not shot any verticals of that scene.

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One odd thing was that the alteration was so pointless. There was lots of smoke in the original. Instead of cloning, he could have fooled around a bit with contrast and curves, and nobody would have said a thing.

 

Part of this, of course, is that he's a stringer and he's in competition with all the other stringers, and only the strongest photos get used and paid for. It alkl reminds me of a story from forty-odd years ago during the race riots in Chicago (or perhaps Detroit) that nobody knew how many people had been killed, but new numbers were coming in all the time from the cops. The story was, UPI just kept an eye on the AP numbers, and when AP came out with a new number, the UPI bureau added two --figuring they were probably accurate anyway -- and shipped off the story. The papers supposedly always went for the bigger numbers...

 

JC

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And to add to the above, I wonder if we could get full-rez photos posted somewhere (maybe we could e-mail Hajj?) and we could ALL Photoshop them for the annual Hajj Blowing Smoke award, given for the most-enhanced, least-detectable photo. Not that it'd be allowed on a serious site like this.

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