<\/p>\n
There are a couple of closely-related ethical issues that have been taunting me as I struggle to decide where I, personally, draw the line. While they are about relatively trivial items, I think they reflect on bigger issues.<\/p>\n
How far is too far when fixing up a blog comment?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
How far is too far when touching up a photograph?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It’s one issue whether you should edit blog articles of your own, after they have been published. It’s another issue about whether you should edit the comments of people kind enough to contribute their own thoughts.<\/p>\n
The default position has to be “Don’t touch!” If I thought that my words would be twisted or modified after I posted a comment to a blog, I would be very hesitant to post any comments at all.<\/p>\n
However, if someone makes a typo in a URL and posts a broken link – isn’t it reasonable for the moderator to simply correct the typo, to match the contributors original intention? After all, they can’t edit it themselves<\/a>.<\/p>\n If that is okay, what about a misspelled word? Should the moderator feel comfortable about correcting it?<\/p>\n If that is okay, what about missing parenthesis? Is it okay to put them back in?<\/p>\n What if the user didn’t realise the How far can we go here? Is it okay to reword a sentence so it doesn’t start with “And”? Is it okay to prevent the sentence from ending in a preposition?<\/p>\n What if someone is simply wrong or boneheaded? Can the comment be simply be deleted? Is it okay to correct the sentence to represent what they would<\/em> have written if they were intelligent and informed person and had given it some thought? <\/p>\n There’s clearly a spectrum here. At one end, it seems innocent enough. At the other end, it is completely unacceptable. Working out where the line is, is tricky.<\/p>\n (For the record: On this blog, I have stretched as far as the blockquote example – and I felt a tinsy bit uncomfortable about doing it. I certainly haven’t deleted any comments that I disagree with – although I have been tempted to delete one or two boneheaded ones. If you think that policy is inappropriate, please comment. I promise not to edit it to make it sound like you agree with me!)<\/p>\n I do a moderate amount of photography as a hobby, and I post many of my photographs to a web-based photograph database. A couple of minute’s effort on processing each photograph can improve the quality immensely. The same dilemma arises.<\/p>\n Suppose you are editing a nice photo of a friend at a party.<\/p>\n Fixing the brightness and contrast of a photo is only fair – they are just artifacts of the camera’s inability to capture light in the same way as the human eye.<\/p>\n Cropping the photo seems fair, too – the ratio of the height to length of a photo is an historical oddity<\/a> of the 35mm format. So, adjusting the image to include only the subject that you are interested in is quite okay – and if that means that the table of empty beer-bottles in the foreground of the shot happens to get left out, so much the better. <\/p>\n No-one would object to removing red-eye, right? Sure, it is a bit more processing, but we are only removing another artifact of the camera.<\/p>\n While we are touching things up, there is a reflection of the flash off of a piece of shiny metal in the background. It is distracting. Let’s just get rid of that.<\/p>\n Another empty beer-bottle on a shelf in the background? It just distracts from the composition. It can go. So can the guy in the background, who managed to stumble into shot by mistake and is gazing at a point off to the right. It draws attention away from the subject. He can go too.<\/p>\n It’s a shame that your friend had a stray eyelash on their cheek. That’s not what they normally look like, so why should they be preserved for posterity like that? Let’s just touch that up. It really wasn’t a good skin day was it? Do we really want skin-blemishes to ruin an otherwise perfect photo? Let’s just heal that over. <\/p>\n Now that you mention it, a poorly-aimed flash really can be make wrinkles look bad. Is softening a few crows’-feet really going to hurt? Let’s do that.<\/p>\n At what point do you stop? Is this your friend at a party, or a mythical fantasy creature that you are creating?<\/p>\n Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History<\/a><\/em> is a documentary about Captain James Francis “Frank” Hurley OBE, an Australian photographer who always impressed me greatly – not just for his photography, but for his real-life adventures. The documentary focussed less on Hurley’s photographs or his remarkable (and disaster-struck) trip to the Antarctic with Shackleton (where they spent the winter huddled under an upturned longboat) and more upon the controversy the Hurley caused when he strayed too far in the darkroom.<\/p>\n To get the perfect photograph, he would composite several shots together. Using shots from the Antarctic, he would add an element of drama to a dull scene, by placing an image of a penguin against a shot of the wild-clouds. Using shots from his multiple stints as a war photographer, he would juxtapose an image of a bi-plane, with a plume of smoke from another scene and a reaction shot of a soldier from another battle – no single, unedited, photograph could convey the scene as strongly as these faked shots.<\/p>\n Journalists, historians and the documentary-producers attacked the practice. Hurley defended it. After watching the documentary, I remained unconvinced, but was tending clearly towards Hurley’s side, even if I don’t think that I would have gone so far as him. <\/p>\n I do not want to sound like an apologist for Hurley. Some of his behaviour, including his treatment of the natives of Papua and the Torres Strait, and his abandonment of his family during his adventures seems – at least to 21st Century eyes – to be disappointing.<\/p>\n Of course, there is a big difference in expectations between commercial photography and photo-journalism. I realise that the photographs that we see in advertisements and billboards have been strongly re-touched. Not just the ones that are clearly tricks to attract your attention – flames coming out of the mouths of models advertising chilli-products, and the like – but regular images that apparently portray reality. I know that these advertisers are willing to go far further than my sensibilities (or even Hurley’s!) would take me.<\/p>\n However, I hadn’t really fathomed how far, until I came across the web-site of Greg Apodaca<\/a>. Apodaca is an accomplished commercial photographer and re-toucher. He has a page with his re-touching portfolio<\/a>, presumable to encourage other people to hire him. He includes before and after images, so you can see what he has achieved.<\/p>\n I encourage you to have a look<\/a>. I don’t include any photos of his here, in line with his requests – even though the fair-use provision in copyright law would probably allow it. (There go those ethical dilemmas again.)<\/p>\n I don’t know what surprised me more – the incredible lengths that have been taken to re-touch the faces of his<\/a> models<\/a> – to the point of being barely recognisable as the same person – or the fact that similar lengths that have been taken to touch-up photos of inanimate objects – the images of the leather shoe<\/a> and the palm computer<\/a> particular stick in my mind.<\/p>\n It certainly opened my eyes – almost as much as his re-touching opened the eyes of his models!<\/p>\n Apodaca warns that some of his images show:<\/p>\n an extreme example of how far an image can be taken.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wonder if he hasn’t sometimes stepped out of his own comfort zone for re-touching. He writes:<\/p>\n It doesn’t seem natural to me to take out every curve, to airbrush out every blemish, but what the Art Director wants, the Art Director will get.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Perhaps I am worrying myself too much about the little issues, especially when far greater photographers (and bloggers) than I seem to be quite proud of their own work when they go far further than I do.<\/p>\n However, I wonder whether ethics have a fractal-nature. Isn’t it just as important to be ethical about the minor issues as the major ones? I’ll have to continue to work out where the line is that I am not willing to cross.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Examination of the ethics of editing photographs and blog comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32,29,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-oddthinking","category-influencing-others","category-observation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<blockquote><\/code> tag was available, and used > symbols instead. Is it okay to update the HTML to improve the appearance and make it easier to understand what is quoted?<\/p>\nTouching up a photo<\/h3>\n
Frank Hurley<\/h3>\n
Greg Apodaca<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h3>\n