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Comment by amasad | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, you've done what most top HN comments do, contribute nothing but uninformed speculations and hearsay.

I think you misunderstood the point of te article, it's not trying to prove that the scene was fake nor staged, but the photo was digitally edited and not worthy of the award.

Digital editing aside, the scene seems to be quite real as it was covered by multiple news outlets and with different photos. Here is the link from the article to the time's photo (by the Reuters) : http://world.time.com/2012/11/15/a-new-gaza-war-israel-and-p...

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You are reading things I didn't say (but thank you for replying otherwise I might not have realized that people would read my comment as me implying the event was faked).

I'm not in any way claiming that the scene was fake or staged. I was expressing an opinion about how it 'looked to me'. i.e. when I look at this photograph the colours and lighting remind me of pictures that have been taken in a studio or with artificial lighting. I was making that point in the context of this winning a competition for press photography where you would not expect a photo to have the look of something seen in a studio.

That is all I was saying.

If I wanted to make the claim that something was faked I would say so.

I am claiming nothing about the event, just the look of this individual photograph and its merits independent of the event it depicts.

I also feel this photo (not the event) do not seem natural. I don't see why this opinion should be shameful in any way. It has nothing to do with the event itself or the poor people in the scene, it has everything to do with a photographer, his tools and his deontology (work ethic).

The implication that the methods of analysis used in the article have similar or less predictive power than your intuition is dismissive, trivializes the hard work of others, and is probably false to boot (look for false positives by google image searching "HDR").

You did not make this implication but the parent post we are discussing certainly did.

To be fair, the implication was probably not made maliciously, and a more appropriate response would have been "This got past the pros because such lighting is possible to achieve in outdoor photography, although it requires a level of skill, equipment, luck, post-processing, and aesthetic risk that make it uncommon outside studio settings."

Yeah, this "plastic" ("airbrush"?) HDR like look can be achieved regardless of source material.

Though the fact that someone could be this... blind or heartless, I'm not sure what it is... to think this is a good "look" for this source material, might warrant a post on DehumanizationNews or something - while PoliticalNews commenters could point out that this hack job essentially turned a bunch of grieving people into an "advancing mob", and that the photographer is a total asshole for that etc.

Personally, today I learned one new thing, how to figure out the position of an unseen light source via hard shadows. Awesome!

Of course it was digitally edited. Since the advent of the digital photography, the very act of taking a photograph (i.e. digitalised version of it) is editing of sorts.

This means nothing. There must be a limit to what one is allowed to edit on a photo, or you would accept the Soviet or Mao era propaganda edits?

I'm not getting into any propaganda issues here as that is proven. The writer only pointed out that MAYBE some lighting has been altered in the photo that won the award. So what. Maybe it was even cropped a little. Gasp.

Meant to say "unproven", heat of the moment typo :)

I think you're confused. An original digital photograph is no more intrinsically "edited" than a photograph taken on film. Would you say a film photo is edited just because of the limits of the film grain? Because the limitations of a digital sensor's pixels are really no different.

So no. Not all digital photos can accurately be said to be edited; there is such a thing as an original digital file, and a distinction to be drawn between that file and an edited version of the original.

You are the one confused. Do you understand the difference between analog and digital? Analog is a direct imprint of the photons that pass through the lense of the camera and have a chemical reaction with the film (simply put). A digital version is a COPY of the image that passes through the lens in the digital camera and by way of that it is already one time manipulated. In any case, I'm not saying I am the only one right here but that it's possible to look at it from different points of views. My overarching goal was to show that the whole claim of the edited photo not deserving a prize was irrelevant - photos are edited daily, every time and that does not take away from their aesthetic, documentary or other value if they are pulled off greatly. Short version: yes, even looking from your angle, the writer could have said the same about ANY photo, analog or digital, arguing that because the light in the photo looked different than what it would look in reality (and don't forget that a human eye is a sort of an imperfect camera itself) it isn't worthy of recognition.

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