Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on February 05, 2012, 12:41

Quote from: click_click on February 05, 2012, 10:51

Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on February 05, 2012, 10:47

What a stupid, meaningless thing to get fired for!

I think it's not about what he has changed in the photo - it was about THAT he changed something in the photo.

Yes, I know. I meant, why risk your career by messing with a trivial bird image?

Curiously, I heard people talking about the winning photo of the annual Al Thani award recently and the universal wisdom was that "man bites wolf" was a photoshop job http://www.al-thaniaward.com/awards_2011/1.jpg but when I attended the talk by the winner it turned out that it was a straightforward snapshot of a man who runs a wolf reserve. The photographer had been getting ready to shoot the wolf greeting the man with a lick but the wolf decided to try to claim the "top-wolf" position by nipping the guy, who promptly replied by biting back and putting the wolf in its place. So the picture - which has won a lot of prizes - was the usual mixture of luck and preparation.

Yeah lucky shot, still quite heavy processing IMO.

I'm sure quite a percentage of journalistic shots are "altered" to some extent to get the extra attention. These days it does require absolute unique and crazy shots to receive some recognition.

Hello everybody,

I just read the conversation about picture manipulation. I am the one who has taken the AL-Thani picture "Man bites wolf". So I hope to give the discussion new energy.
First of all. I did not manipulate the picture itself. I work with the wolves for over 18 years now. They are not domesticated, but they accept some few people. But we can not tell them what to do and we must always be careful, because the wolves might attack. I took many pictures over the years. And I can foresee some situations, what might happen. In that case I knew, the wolf and the man are always a little bit picky with each other, but it had never been that bad as at that day. So the picture was taken with a well prepared equipment, a well prepared photographer and a portion of luck. If you shoot animals you ALWAYS need luck. You can be the best photographer of the world, if you do not have any luck, you will not get a impressive picutre. ( I hope you understand what I mean. By the way. Sorry for my bad English. It is not my native language. )

Back to the picture. When I took the picture it was late in the afternoon, in a forest, under trees with a lot of shadow and it was an dynamic situation. You can imagine how difficult it is to get use able pictures.

The Al-Thani Award is an competition. Not a magazine or a newspaper. My "normal" pictures are often used for books, articles, merchandising and even TV productions (Advertisement). I normally do not manipulate my pictures that much. Let's say I give my clients the pictures they want and they pay for.
If you see the pictures in competitions, I think 90% are manipulated. At least in brightness, contrast and color. That is what I did with my picture, too. Much stronger than I would usual do it, but I knew it was for an competition.
If I sell pictures to newspapers e.g. I of course do not manipulate them. If the pictures are used in books, I optimize them in brightness, contrast and color, but in  a normal way. At the Al-Thani competition it is allowed to compose as much as you want. I heard lectures of other winner. They explained that their winning picture was composed out of 5 to 10 pictures and they needed 1 to 10 month to finish it.
At least in this competition, it is allowed. So it is O.K.
In journalism. Composing or changing the content and message of a photo is not allowed. 
It always differs of the usage.

By the way. I would prefer, that every competition runs two ways. One for real pictures and one for composed pictures. Composing in photography is like doping. These people create art. I do not have any question about that. But it has nothing to do with an old fashion photo.
So the photographer and the "computer"-grapher, have the possibility to win.

Some positive words at the end, yes I was more than proud to win the competition with an not composed photo.

I hope to see some comments about your thoughts.


Greetings (and sorry for all the mistakes)

Michael