Me & my shadow

unemployed:
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harsh but necessary if you ask me... but I ask you? fair treatment? or overzealous application or arbitrary rules?

Their agency, their rules.
He can always start another agency with his rules.
Or work for News of the World.

Ooh, harsh. I understand the reason for the rules, and he should have raised the fact that he had done some cloning with the editors if he was in any doubt. But as it didn't change the image content materially, it should have been a 'yellow card' situation imo. He's being punished extra harshly, imo, for the dishonest manipulations done by other photographers which AP should have picked up on, and which caused them embarrassment.

You have to draw a line in the sand.
Not using photoshop, that is ......
Otherwise where do you stop?

hmmm - maybe he has 'offended' before and been warned .

I can see their point. In photojournalism I think you need to leave the errors in to make it obvious that the image hasn't been fiddled with, as otherwise your readers will notice the innocent tweaks like this and wonder what else you've adjusted (which could completely change the impression conveyed by an image).

There's enough trouble as it is with journalists only capturing/reporting things which support their own personal prejudices, we know it happens all the time. I'm happy to see at least one news source demanding unedited images for this reason. If you have this rule then it has to apply to all.

Quite easy.

The rules are there to protect the substance of the contents like it's writing in the article so as long as the content isn't changed then it's alright.

They allow cropping. He probably should have cropped the image and be done with it. Of course in this instance cropping or cloning have the same result- no effect on the image's content. (And it's not a hard hitting news story here anyway). But there have been cases where images have been cropped and it has dramatically changed the story they told. You can decide not to frame certain things in shot and mislead the viewer. This is kind of what photography is about - emphasising and de-emphasising certain things to tell a story. All trickery. The key thing is whether the photographer is honest, or deliberately sets out to create a distorting picture.

I think in this day and era, there really is no choice but zero tolerance on image manipulation. The more you let slide, the harder people will push boundaries... and eventually somebody somewhere will go too far, and get caught... We live in an era where to maintain some level of trust or believability, there has to be a line that you just don't cross, period. No margin for argument. Sad to see someone being made an example out of, but needed.

it is like the speed limit... if the posted limit is 100, and the cops say we'll give the driver 10 km grace, everybody starts driving 110, expecting to not get a ticket, but when everybody is doing 110, a few will try 115, and the odd idiot will proclaim "I had no choice but to do 140. How else was I gonna get past the line of drivers doing 115? Everybody else was speeding, I just got singled out!"

In reality the cops do let you off going a few mph over. They rightly target the dangerous speeders rather than bothering with someone doing 75.

I've never heard such hypocritical nonsense.

The mainstream media is full of photoshopped photographs painting a misleading representation of reality.

AP are no exception.

+1

Which makes it odd that they singled this chap out, surely? There must be more depth to the story which we're not hearing. Unless it's a case of them wanting images to be handed to them unaltered so they can then manipulate them to fit the story they want to write...

I didn't think you were that naive.

Perhaps they have lots of examples in the past and are trying to be cleaner than clean.