when is it manipulation

[Graham Patterson]

The journals will accept retouched SEM pictures? Come to think of it, when I was doing SEM work, Photoshop was just gaining a hold and we had real film in the cameras.

Documentary work needs provenance. Otherwise it raises doubts about the concepts it is supposed to be supporting.

[Daniel Geiger]

Hi Graham,

Now all SEMs are digital. On the Philips 512 it was 35 mm film, the old Cambridge 360 was retrofitted to take VGA images, also with Polaroid sandwich option. On the newer machines I've used (LEO 435: 800K file, Hitachi 3000N: 4 MB files; our Zeiss EVO 40XVP with 7 MB files) it is purely digital capture. I found out about my colleagues retouching when discussing his physical specimen cleaning techniques. I was quite amazed. Now I put into my M&M what manipulations were carried out, and which ones weren't. As an editor, I am also looking at images and if they are too good/clean, I will ask the authors. I think many people at scientific journals don't consider the possiblity and it is a don't ask, don't tell policy. I don't endorse it but that's reality. I don't think that photoshop is deliberately used to misrepresent the results, it is more the desire to make a visually appealing product.

Temporas mutantur and nos mutamur in illis. Or--quoting Monty Python-- "As we say in English, c'est la vie" ;-)

[Janko Belaj]

I agree with definition " can't define it, but I know it when I see it". But... photography is basically a "painting with light", so anything you created with light should be named "photography". Just look at rayograms (Man Ray). But than we have a lot of photographs manipulated with painting - ink or pencil. We call that retouch. Is that "clean" photography? If only dust have been removed, it should be, but what about montage and more complex illustrations based on photographs? We agree that those should be named "photo-illlustrations", but some galleriest won't agree, some art historians won't agree. I don't know.



Well, I haven't said anything new, but will tell now something from one of my exhibitions - I have photographed work of one baroque painter, and me and the art historian who researched that painter and discovered a lot of his lost work have made decision that we will not present his work as documentary photographs - that will be pointless because you could just jump in to the car and drove to the churches he have painted. We decided that I will go to digital retouching and reconstructing of his work. Because we wanted to show the beauty of his work, and not the negligence which devastated some of his work during those 250 years. Time, water, earthquakes, wars, humidity, communism, stupidity... last free the most - we have, in our archive, some color photographs from time between 2 world wars - so we know (and can imagine) the color and power of those paints.
Here is one example I have made:http://ik-ranger.net/otvorena_nebesa/007.php. The upper picture is the whole dome of one church, missing the central scene, I took elements from the same scenery that the very same artist have painted in same time in one other church, have changed a color just a bit so can be applied to this church and have got - "photo-illustration" presented in lower image. And I admit it. And I don't feel guilty at all. That was on purpose with purpose. And I don't feel guilty when I remove track of the plain in the sky, but I don't like to remove trunks from picture... don't ask me why. I rather won't take landscape with it.<br
Ah, that's all, I don't feel I'm able to bring any new light to this discussion... maybe we don't need at all?

[paulr]

i agree that when it comes to art, the line is going to be personal and subjective. in the world of journalism and documentation, though, they have lines drawn by consensus. there are definitely things that are permitted and things that are not. obviously, airbrushing out a former ally/current foe, Kremlin-style, crosses that line. i imagine there are some journalists/documentarians among us who can tell us more specifically about the ethics of those trades.

[Kirk Gittings]

I sometimes shoot the same architecture for advertising and then for editorial. For advertising anything goes, but for editorial I draw the line pretty early because the editorial images should reflect what a building actually looks like in the real world.

The strictest client in my business is the Historic American Building Survey. We generally don't even pick up trash for them. Sometimes though we have to artificially light an interior to even get a picture but that can really compromise the existing lighting.

Frankly I care more about these issues than any of my clients. Where i draw the line is always well before my clients reach their tolerance level.