Image Manipulation in the News
An image of an Iranian missile test intended for media circulation was digitally manipulated but not before it was released on newswires around the world. It’s no surprise that this image was conceived of or created, manipulated images are common in photographic history and certainly there is no end in sight to their proliferation. The important question is what safeguards should be in place to ensure that manipulated images are discarded and not published.
The ubiquitous nature of Photoshop requires continual scrutiny of photojournalism. Oversight by experts in the field of digital imaging is essential, given that the creditability of photojournalism is dependent on the public perception that news images accurately document real time events.
It is amazing to think that this sloppy Photoshop job was not detected. The majority of all press photography is now produced using digital cameras, so the first line of defense against manipulated images is the camera metadata (date created, shutter speed, f-stop, etc…). The next obvious test would be a through visual review to look for signs of image manipulation.
AP (left) and AFP (right)
Notes and Articles
A great article on PopPhoto.com about a Disposable Camera project in rural Afghanistan: http://www.popphoto.com/photographynewswire/5229/disposable-cameras-help-rural-afghani-students-document-school-conditions.html
Commercial Photo Agency and Advocacy
An interesting article about the interaction of commercial photo agencies and student photographers in the:
British Journal of Photography http://www.bjphoto.co.uk/public/showPage.html?page=663497
Photo Contest
The International Year of the Potato 2008 was officially launched on 18 October 2007 at United Nations Headquarters in New York.
World Photography Contest, Focus on a global food, supports two key objectives of the International Year of the Potato: to increase awareness of the importance of potato as a food in developing nations, and to promote research and development of potato-based systems as a means of contributing to achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.http://www.potato2008.org/en/photocontest/index.html
The Pulitzers Prize Winners for:
BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY Adrees Latif of Reuters http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2008/breaking-news-photography/
FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY Preston Gannaway of the Concord Monitor http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2008/feature-photography/works/
We are excited to welcome a new contributor to Photoshare:
Erberto Zani- See his Flickr’s page: (http://flickr.com/people/erbertozani)
I’ll post a link to Erberto’s photos once they have been added to the Photoshare collection.