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Comment by teebs | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my ignorance, but why is it so horrible to use a photo manipulated by the source--especially if you know exactly how and why it was manipulated, and you still have access to the original? This manipulation seems rather benign, too. Why must it be "removed from your photo archives"?

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For example, the moon landing is a subject of many conspiracy theorists who claim it was fabricated. A doctored image (esp. by NASA) published just gives them another reason to argue that there was never a moon-landing as all the images from it are obviously fake.

Second, any reporter must verify his, or her sources, otherwise they are subject to manipulation and if a source is falsifying information, for whatever reason, that information must not be used as the reported cannot know to which degree was the information tampered with. It might have been just a minor cosmetic touch-up, or it might have been a complete fabrication. So while the demand to remove from the archive a famous 43-year old image sounds odd, it's very much on par with a practise that any decent publication must follow or risk the integrity of their whole publication.

Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue.

that information must not be used as the reported cannot know to which degree was the information tampered with

Yet, in this case the reporter knows to which degree the information was tampered with - and the reporter has no problem verifying it either.

"Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue."

Yes, but that's still no reason to release a known "fake" image. Also, you can tag it with captions and disclosures, and someone might still link to the image as "look, there's no antenna on his head unlike other photos, proving the landing is a fake".

"Yet, in this case the reporter knows to which degree the information was tampered with - and the reporter has no problem verifying it either."

Publications have a no-doctored-images policy, it doesn't allow for exceptions, even if the length of the manipulation is known, especially when the original is available.

Actually, it is the other way round - not the journalist has to know how much tampering has occured - I, the reader, have to trust the newspaper to get everything right in their reporting. Unlike in science, journalists often can not or do not want to reveal their sources and attribute every statement. Therefore, I need to be able to trust the newspaper as a whole that they have appropriate safeguards in place to detect and avoid false information and tampered images. By being holier than the pope, the newspaper supports this trust.

I don't know if you've ever heard of a 'bright line rule' [0] - the idea is you have a simple rule everyone can understand and interpret in the same way, instead of a nuanced rule with lots of room for interpretation.

If you use a simple-to-follow rule like "no editing except to crop and correct color balance" that's easy to understand and follow.

When you allow some manipulation as long as it's noted, editors will composite a celebrity's face onto a model's body for the front page and note it's as a fake in tiny text in a contents list three pages away. Far-fetched? Newsweek have already done it [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_line_rule [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/business/media/03mag.html

"Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue."

And people brainwashed by mainstream propaganda don't need reasons to repeat what they've heard on TV ;-)

Except a lot of them have pretty good reasons, while those brainwashed by crackpottery don't.

The "doctoring" of the photo involves cropping part of the bottom away and adding a black border to the top. It was clearly done to improve the composition rather than to deceive or mislead.

If crops, borders, rotations, etc. constitute "doctoring" then virtually every publicity photo NASA releases has been doctored. And if those minor transformations aren't allowed then surely none of the composite photos from the Mars probes are acceptable either, right? Compositing is way more invasive than cropping and rotating.

At any rate, NASA has published the raw version of all their photos and therefore, everything is verifiable.

To play a slightly comical devil's advocate, what if Neil Armstrong had intentionally angled the camera down to avoid photographing their flying saucer escort? From the original it's not obvious that the area above Buzz Aldrin's helmet is black.

Yes, I know, it is really, but you don't know that from the photo, and that's an important distinction when you don't know the full context your reporting of the photo will be presented in at a future date. I think the argument is that crops and rotations are generally ok (although the argument about the upside-down footprint is interesting), but a transformation which claims to add information not originally in the photo cannot be ok.

Even a simple crop can make a large effect: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread545972/pg1

> Pardon my ignorance, but why is it so horrible to use a photo manipulated by the source

One reason I don’t want to see it: That’s not Neil. That’s Buzz Aldrin.

The main objection is that's not a photo of Neil.

Journalistic ethics basically.

I'd just woken up so I didn't qualify this as much as I should have, all though the tl;dr is just the three words above.

Newspapers are based around a mission of delivering facts (or at least the facts they want to share), and when that core rule is violated the inherent trust is broken. So when someone is misquoted, a story manufactured and so on then the journalists have failed, are fired and cast out of the community (mostly). Photography was one of the biggest changes to news reporting as it allowed facts to be visually disseminated as well, but because they're essentially a snapshot of the moment as it had happened modification of almost any kind was immediately held up as a no-no.

Some newspapers are getting a bit more progressive, but every 3-6 months in the photography community there's a discussion regarding whether the tools photographers use should be allowed in photojournalism, or whether in the central mission of delivering the truth photo modification, even in a trivially form, is counter as how can you say the changes haven't gone further.

For the more curious: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/06/15/time-travel-and-ethical-...

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/03/08/should-photo-contests-re...

http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2006/08/ethics.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/22/opinion/phones-instagram-a...

Generally yeah, but in this case? If they 100% knew for a fact that the sky above his head was black, then adding some black padding is fine. Maybe not from a photography standpoint, but from a journalistic one? Come on..

This is why it's so contentious, it improves the photo but it's no longer original. Oddly from a photographic side that's fine, but photo journalistic standpoint it's no longer the moment that was capture but a modified version. It's a thorny issue with grey areas.

"Burning" the edges [of the final print] to the extent it mimics the "deep black" of space, is in fact faithful to the scene. PJ's "Burn" the edges of news images everyday. That is, they "darken" the edges to create relative contast to the focal point they wish to show. This is not deemed unethical, but rather legitmatley "expressive". The terminology comes from film emulsion days, when the overexposre of the positive image to (unfiltered) light, would darkens the photosensive elemnts of the (white) paper. The fact that this was shot originally in MF film, makes me feel better about this, for some reason. The original negative would have been "clear" in this area.

It does differ from publication to publication, but it depends on how much of a stickler for rules and ethics they are.

I'm also alright with it, they had to do what they had to do to make it work and make it clear.

Rather astonishing that they would adhere to "ethics" so strictly with regard to images, when the written journalism is so often slanted, sloppy, and/or incomplete.

I wondered that too. I guess if your photo archives are supposed to be the bastion of utter truth (i.e. no manipulated one) then it makes sense, because unless you mark is as "edited" or similar, other users/people that come across the photo would assume it to be untouched.

It depends on how precise you want to be I suppose.

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