Extra discussion

Media manipulation

 The public tends to assign too much reality to what they see in photographs. We should approach all news photos as somewhat unreal. What does it mean for a photograph to be true? That it captures what we would perceive of we were standing where the camera was? That's nonsense. A camera sees quite differently from a human eye. Normal human vision is roughly equivalent to what you get from a 35 millimeter camera lens zoomed out a little bit to between 42mm and 50mm. A lens longer than that shows details no human eye could see. A lens shorter than that shows an unnaturally broad view and too little detail.

 There are restrictions to the way any camera can capture an image. Details that you or I could easily see in person may be lost in glare or sunk in a dark spot. Is it okay, then, to use photo editing software to emphasize such details and amend the inaccurate picture? Doing this would, in some ways, make the photo more accurate. What about emphasizing lost details that would not be visible to an eyewitness? That would make the photo more accurate in other ways. Should news organizations grant their photographers permission to do that? If not, then should we ban photos taken through microscopes? You can see how quickly the situation gets confused. Of course, photographs alter every photograph they take, simply because they have to make choices about how to take it. They have to decide where to stand, how to stand, whether to put a filter on the lens, and so on. Editors alter them as well, literally and figuratively. Long before digital photography came along, newspaper editors chopped the edges off photographs, enlarged them, and eliminated scratches or spots with correction fluid. Photo editing software is simply a far smarter successor to those tools. Editors also write headlines and captions, words that can dramatically affect the viewer's perception of the image. A picture of a fallen tree is just a fallen tree until the words tell you whether it's a goods thing or a bad thing. What you see when you contemplate a news photo is what you're told to see.