So what do I do here?

So lets say the photog was shooting a tennis match, and an empty can of Coke was in the way. Would it be unethical to kick the trash out of the way?
And what if the flash gave the person in the pic a bad case of red-eye. Would it be wrong to take the red-eye out?
Without knowing all the details in this deal, it is hard to say if it was right or wrong, but I'm leaning toward neither.

 

Again, sorry I can't give you details. But I do think there is a difference between clearing obstructive garbage out of the way in order to get a shot not about garbage and ADDING to a shot something related to the shot in order to add to its visual impact.

 

I think it's best to just let it go Valiant.
I still don't understand why you this is so horribale or why you would even consider causing trouble for the guy because of it.

 

Are you typing while drunk, or with broken fingers or something? Not used to seeing so many typos in your posts.

 

Well, I was asking for advice precisely because I didn't know what I wanted to do or how bad his actions actually were.

I've never thought it was "so horrible." But I did, and do, think it was a violation of photojournalism ethics, and I was, and continue to be, embarrassed by it. That's all.

 

Nah, my typing always sucks. It actually gets better after I've been drinking.

 

I was with a photographer who was shooting a news event and asked one of the people to take their hat off.
It was throwing shadows across their face and made the picture pretty much unusable.
I didn't think it was a big deal then and I don't think that adding something in the background is all that big of a deal in photography world.
Photogs do things all the time whether it is manipulating images with photoshop or staging pictures that reporters could not get away with, but photogs do.
I'm not saying it is right, or for that matter, wrong. It's just the way they roll.

 

That is absolutely not how they roll, unless they are ethically-challenged.
Unless I'm shooting a portrait, I wouldn't even dream of asking a subject to remove a hat, or moving objects around in the scene. And I'm not alone - almost every news photographer I know would agree. There are exceptions, of course, just as there are reporters who make up quotes and plagiarize.
And if you think manipulating images in photoshop is acceptable in the newspaper world, look up Brian Walski, Patrick Schneider or Allan Detrich.

 

then how much dodging is allowed? How much can you lighten a photo, or clean up shadows?

EVERY photo is altered before it gets in a paper.

 

yep. And S.I. engages in this practice to a sometimes outrageous degree. Getting inside the helmet to illuminate the subject.

I'm still so confused as to what the photog did.

The key to me was you said this was a feature, and not covering the event for the action.

 

"Feature" doesn't mean "portrait photography." It just means that I was not writing this as a breaking-news story for the next day's paper - that the event in which the photog did his thing was one of several I'll be writing about in a larger, contextualizing piece.

I was indeed "covering the event for the action," just not for a story on the event alone.

 

Yes, every photo is altered before it gets in the paper. So in the literal sense, every photo is manipulated. It has to be.

Newsprint is about the consistency of toilet paper, for one, and can't physically hold a lot of ink, so photos need to be adjusted for that. They have to be converted from RGB to CMYK, which has a much smaller color gamut (duller, less vivid colors), requiring more adjustments. And the human eye sees a much wider range of light than a camera is capable of recording.

My point is that yes, every photo is altered, but only so that the picture you see in the paper looks as close as possible to what I saw through the viewfinder. Anything beyond that, to me, is altering reality. How is that any different than changing a quote?