Last week we reported that the Sacramento Bee had suspended one of its photographers for splicing together a photo of egrets. After some further investigation into Bryan Patrick’s body of work, the newspaper discovered two more photos that had been Photoshopped. It immediately fired Patrick and published a notice:

After The Bee published a correction and apology online Wednesday and in print Thursday, editors reviewed a selection of Patrick’s work and found two additional digital alterations that violate The Bee’s standards.

[...] In a 2009 photograph of the Auburn wildfire that was published unaltered in the newspaper, Patrick subtly enlarged the flames in the photograph submitted for a winning entry to the San Francisco Bay Area Press Photographers Association annual contest. An anonymous email to The Bee late Thursday cast suspicion on that photograph.

NPPA president Sean Elliot wasn’t surprised by the firing, saying, “If he’s willing to move a couple of egrets around, if he’s willing to jazz up flames to make a photo more exciting, how do we know there aren’t more?… How do we trust the work?”

(via SacBee via Poynter)

Update: We’ve updated the post to describe Patrick as a “photographer” rather than “photojournalist”.

Thanks for the tip, Jess!

The Washington Post raised some eyebrows last Friday after running an uber-saturated front page photo with the caption stating that it was “a composite created by taking several photos and combining them with computer software to transcend the visual limitations of standard photography.” After emailing the photo editor, Poynter learned that the image was simply an HDR photograph. While it’s a pretty common technique these days, some believe that it has no place in photojournalism,

Sean Elliot, president of the National Press Photographers Association, said, “HDR is not appropriate for documentary photojournalism.” The organization’s code of ethics say photographers should respect the integrity of the digital moment, “and in that light an HDR photo is no different from any other digital manipulation.”

“By using HDR,” he told me by email, “The Washington Post has combined different moments, and thereby created an image that does not exist. The aircraft visible in the final product was not there for all the other moments combined into the final, and that alone simply raises too many questions about the factual validity of the actual published image.” [#]

What complicates matters is that many new cameras (e.g. Nikon D4, Apple iPhone 4S) offer HDR features that create single images from multiple exposures in the camera. The Washington Post published a response to the controversy yesterday. Do you think HDR is an appropriate technique for photojournalists to use?

(via The Washington Post via Poynter)

Image credits: Screenshot from The Washington Post, and photograph by Bill O’Leary

The New York Times has sent an angry letter to the New York Police Department after video emerged showing photojournalist Robert Stolarik being pushed around and then blocked while trying to photograph officers arresting Occupy Wall Street protestors. The memo itself hasn’t be published, but NYT VP and assistant general counsel George Freeman is quoted as saying,

It seemed pretty clear from the video that the Times freelance photographer was being intentionally blocked by the police officer who was kind of bobbing and weaving to keep him from taking photographs

The department has acknowledged receiving the note from the NYT, but has not issued a formal response yet. This incident comes just weeks after Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly ordered officers to avoid unreasonably interfering with media access during news coverage.
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CNN created quite a stir yesterday after laying off a dozen photojournalists due to the rise of citizen journalism and the availability of cameras. Here’s a humorous response to the story by Stephen Colbert, who gives us a glimpse into the “uncompensated future of news”.

Thanks for the tip, Eduardo!

Roughly 50 staffers at CNN were given pink slips today, including nearly a dozen photojournalists. In an email to the staff, Senior VP Jack Womack cited the accessibility of cameras and the growth of citizen journalism as reasons for the terminations:

We also spent a great deal of time analyzing how we utilize and deploy photojournalists across all of our locations in the U.S. [...] We looked at the impact of user-generated content and social media, CNN iReporters and of course our affiliate contributions in breaking news. Consumer and pro-sumer technologies are simpler and more accessible. Small cameras are now high broadcast quality. More of this technology is in the hands of more people. After completing this analysis, CNN determined that some photojournalists will be departing the company.

CNN’s citizen journalism initiative, iReport, has proved extremely valuable as a source of imagery during things like disasters and protests. However, it has also received criticism for not paying for submitted photos — even those that are subsequently broadcast worldwide.

(via The Hollywood Reporter via FilmmakerIQ)

Image credit: CNN by Ayushπ

Jasna Hodzic, the photo editor of the student run newspaper at UC Davis, has been covering the Occupy UC Davis movement since its inception — before the pepper spraying incident became international news.
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Here’s a fascinating video in which Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how dishonest many conflict photographs are. Salvadori spent a significant amount of time in East Jerusalem, studying the role photojournalists play in what the world sees. By turning his camera on the photographers themselves, he shows how photojournalists often influence the events they’re supposed to document objectively, and how photographers are often pushed to seek and create drama even in situations that lack it.

You might start looking at conflict photos in the news a lot differently after watching this.

(via ISO1200)

The rise of microstock and the fact that anyone with a camera can sell cheap photos has done a lot to devalue stock photography, but is the same thing happening to the photojournalism industry? Paul Melcher says that the industry is headed in that direction:

Forget the photo agency as an agent of talented photojournalists. The key now is to have a lot of contributors worldwide and hope that one will be at the right place at the right time. With photographers everywhere chances you will get the right image at the right time will increase, like buying a lot of lottery tickets.
In the film age, the cost of film, processing, shipment was too prohibitive. Now, you can receive and store million of images for a buck or two.

[...] Thus, taking a queue from the microstock model, photojournalism is now switching to the volume based model. While profitable for a photo agency, it is devastating for photojournalism and photographers themselves.

The story is the same: as technology makes photography and the distribution of photographs easier to do, the buyers of photographs win and the producers of photographs lose.

Volume based photojournalism (via The Click)

Image credit: Everyone is a photographer. by andrew.chau

Last friday, Dayton Daily News photo editor Larry Price received instructions to lay off half of his photo staff. Rather than follow through with the order, Price — a 35-year veteran photojournalist and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in photography — decided to sacrifice his own job instead, resigning from the post this past Monday. Ginger Christ of the Dayton BizBlog writes,

In his 35 years as a photojournalist [...], Price has seen the industry shrink, watched as newspapers cut their workforce and all but eliminated photography departments in efforts to consolidate and cut costs.

“I’ve watched this happen in newspapers year after year now. I’ve had many, many friends that have been affected, many stellar journalists,” Price said. “These people are my group. They’re my friends. They’re my colleagues. I’ve asked so much of them in the four years I’ve been here. Every time, they’ve stepped up to the plate and delivered. It wasn’t a decision I could make in good conscience.”

Price is also troubled by the fact that newspapers abandon photojournalistic quality when photos don’t help increase profits, saying, “the bottom line simply is not as important as what information can convey to people in helping them make decisions.”

(via DaytonBizBlog via The Click)

After Bang-Bang Club photographer Joao Silva lost his legs to a land mine in Afghanistan in October of last year, NYTimes executive editor Bill Keller stated, “He will be missed until — as I have no doubt he will — he returns to action, cameras blazing.” Keller predicted correctly — Silva has returned to work less than a year after suffering his horrific injuries:

[...] as the Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise rushed uphill on Wednesday to cover the closing ceremony at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, she spotted a very familiar face in the crowd. Mr. Silva, wearing a T-shirt with the exclamation “Pow!” written across the front, was already on the scene. He was smiling. He was walking on his prosthetic legs. And he was taking pictures.

One of those photos, of soldiers and visitors watching a parachute demonstration during the ceremony, was chosen for Page 1 of The Times on Thursday. [#]

Silva tells the NYTimes, “It was a matter of making the best of what I had. There will come a time when I can run, but now I can walk.”

Back in Action and Back on Page 1 [NYTimes]