please note this post is not by Jay Clapp Photography but from the photography news at the guardian for your viewing pleasure please feel free to use the share buttons at the bottom.
Photographers sometimes face a dilemma when editing their images, when there is a choice between art and truth
Although I am happy for most people to think of me as a sports photographer, I would prefer to think of myself as a photographer who happens to specialise in sport. Sports photography is like a Venn diagram; it has its own unique aspects, but has overlapping techniques with other forms of photography like portraiture and landscape. My work is not limited to sitting on a touchline waiting for a goal or key incident to happen in front of me. Indeed, I find it refreshing to go on a job where I am more in control and get time to compose and move around a subject. Recently I have been working on two such projects.
Toward the end of January I spent a couple of days documenting the sad state of Welsh club rugby. Even though the subject revolved around sport, the pictures I took were either portraits or landscapes. It was midweek and there were no matches being played on the famous grounds at Bridgend, Maesteg and Pontypool – but this helped to convey the desired mood. It was a case of finding the right spot, then waiting for the right light and atmosphere, just as a landscape photographer would work.
A similar mood was echoed in a story I covered in early February. I was invited back to the Olympic Park exactly six months after the end of the games to see what had happened to some of the venues. It felt like going back to the future. Donning safety boots, goggles, hat and gloves, I was walking back in time, back on to the building sites I had photographed in the years leading up to the Games. Even though I know that some of these venues will have a grand future once they have been transformed into “legacy” mode, it still felt sad. The basketball arena is now a ghostly shell, and will soon disappear completely, just as the hockey arenas have already been wiped away.
The scenes reminded me of a fantastic photography book I saw last year by Andrew Moore called Detroit Disassembled, in which he depicted the decline of Motor City in a series of urban landscapes that showed empty, dilapidated buildings and factories. Where once there was life and vigour, now there was only desolation and emptiness.
To aid the feeling I wanted to portray at the Olympic Park, I toyed with the idea of desaturating my images. Even though the grey horrible February day helped, I liked the idea of having just a slight amount of colour in these scenes. It would have helped with a venue like the swimming pool, which once generated such excitement but now had a real feeling of being mothballed. I was faced with a dilemma: as a photographer for a newspaper, am I allowed to digitally alter my pictures? Am I distorting the truth? Should I leave them straight and show how they are in real life? I suppose it depends on the context in which the pictures are appearing. If I were an artist preparing work for a book or exhibition then surely I would be free to do what I want? But I work for a newspaper where the readers expect the truth, don’t they?
We operate under a loose set of guidelines where I know I cannot digitally manipulate a photograph to the extent of removing or adding content, for instance moving or adding a ball. We are allowed to lighten, darken and remove glitches caused by dust on the camera sensor. But changing the saturation or converting to black-and-white? I feel happy about using filters to create an effect before taking a picture, but uneasy about creating the same effect in post-production. But am I not tweaking the truth by putting on a filter? Maybe there is no right and wrong here. It’s all a grey area – much like the Olympic Park at the moment.
via Art and design: Photography | guardian.co.uk http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/photography-blog/2013/mar/13/digital-photojournalism-tweaking-truth-photography Tom Jenkins Thanks for reading Jay
via WordPress http://jayclappphotography.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/digital-photojournalism-am-i-tweaking-the-truth/
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