Ethics of Altering Pictures

I was reading through some of the earlier posts, and came across Feeling Through Pictures from 10/10. It was a response to the warped photos of Wall Street brokers as a way of expressing emotion via photos. Then below there was a comment which spoke of the belief that it is unethical for a news organization to alter or skew any photos. I agree - news organizations should not alter photos. In fact, I used to be dead-against altering even personal photos.

My feeling was that if you took a picture and it came out badly, you took a bad shot and that was a bloody shame. Had you wanted a better shot, you'd have taken the time to set it up, make it square, adjust settings, etc. Then I started doing a lot of traveling. And some of my on-the-go photos were, well, bad. Unfortunately, I do not have the funds to fly back over to Europe, Central America, Africa of Australia to retake a picture. The desire to have a clear, beautiful picture overpowered my feeling that the alteration of a picture ended before the shutter closed. Here are some pictures that I altered my second day ever with Photoshop, when I finally got over my stigma of altering photos.

PS - Photoblog is actually a pretty fun site to be a part of, if you're in the market for a photo sharing site.