So what do I do here?

In issues like this, we always used the text "photo illustration by" instead of "photo by" to cover our hides ethically. It lets the readers know that the photo has been manipulated in some way.

 

That is not a photo illustration becuase you did not alter the photo.
You might have set up a photo, or manipulated what the photog was shooting before he took the photo, but you did not alter the actual photo...which is what constitutes a photo illustration.

 

No no. Buckweaver had it right the first time. What you said above is exactly correct: the photog shot the participant doing what he was doing, then added the item to "add to" the shot. This was an event in progress, not a posed feature shot.

 

Then I agree with Buck. You can't run that shot. Ethically, it's the same as you making up a quote. In essence, that picture is a lie.
We never knowingly print lies.

 

I still don't get it valiant.
He disrupted a live event to add "an accessory" to get into the photo?

 

Yes. It was a small-scale event. But, in short, a group of people were doing something in front of an audience, the freelancer was shooting them, and then he ran off for a moment, came back, added something to the scene, and continued shooting. He didn't "disrupt," since the group of people continued to do what they were doing, but...he intruded, certainly.

 

To my mind, if the people were posing for the shot, you're clear.

If they were doing whatever they were doing and he added something to the shot, then you can't run it.

 

They weren't posing. Thanks thanks.

 

Valiant, can you post an equivalent?
I think I know what's going on, but I don't want to get into outing territory.
For example, it's obviously not football, but I'm picturing a football game going on, and the photographer is on the sideline shooting the third-string quarterback, who isn't playing, with the game going on the background. The photographer goes and grabs a kicking tee and sets it in front of the QB and continues to shoot.
In that case, it's almost a combination feature-live shot, but maybe I'm totally off on what happened.

 

That's a fair equivalent.

Another: say someone dressed as a nerdy professor for Halloween - glasses, suspenders, books in hand - and, as he was walking around trick-or-treating, a photographer came and put a bunch of pens in his front pocket to make him look more professor-like. It wouldn't change anything significant, but it would be a change.

 

If what the photog did was the equivalent of putting pens in the erdy professor's pocket....there is nothing to worry about.

 

I think it is indisputable that the photographer was in the wrong. You just cannot alter a scene to make your photograph look better. Your news-event photo claims to capture reality, capture the moment photographed, as a man on the street would have encountered it; if you have added something to the scene, however small that thing is, you have altered reality.

I just wonder if I should get the guy in trouble over it, given its smallness. But I understand that it's difficult for you guys to make definitive judgments without exact details.