feversmile

Ethics

Ethics is a topic close to my heart. Why? Mostly with journalism and the world of photo journalism. It’s fairly simple. You see a photograph, you hope it truthful. I learned and researched photo ethics quite a bit while I was working on the News Channel for AOL (at the time Netscape/CompuServe). I quickly became a big proponent of it and even taught workshops on it to my fellow employees.

Why do we need to have ethic in such a field, well it’s really the only we have to give to our readers. Be truthful, absolutely, be actually “Fair and balanced” and not lean one way or another. Be objective, and present a story as it happens, not as you wish it would happen. A photograph can tell a story more so then a written article and must be presented without manipulation and bias.

With computers and programs like Photoshop becoming more and more powerful and much easier for the common user we see examples of even professionals using the programs in the wrong way. Allan Detrich, a veteran, award winning photojournalist for the Toledo Blade was found to digitally altering photographs. Why is so wrong, you can say the photos may look better because of it, but the matter is hand is telling the truth. Telling the story as it happened and not how one wish it happened.

Written into our US Constitution is the write to a free press. This is more important then one may think or want it to be. Yes, myself included, we can all get tired of the overbearing, annoying journalist, out for a story at all costs. But, in our culture we need some people to investigate the wrong doings and stories and make the general public aware of such things. But they also need to be held to a code of ethics. This is one reason an organization like the National Press Photographer Association has a code of ethics that each member must sign off on to join.

So Why have I gone into this today? The BBC today reported about a group of researchers that are developing software to manipulate photos to correct them and make them look better. Ok, fine. We all want out photos to look better, but the way the software works is to go out to sites such as Flickr and find similar photographs to replace the part of your image you didn’t like. For me, this is wrong in several ways. It’s unethical to manipulate a photo in such as way to deceive. But more so, I’m tired of the way photographs are in a way automatically becoming public domain if they are on are published on a website. This is one very large reason I won’t put many images on Flickr. Flickr has become a site people come to when they need images for whatever use. This to me cheapens photography and gifted photographers out there. Hard working photojournalists and full time photographers have their work stolen everyday. Which is, against copyright law. If you see a photo on a website, this does not give you permission to to use it, on your computer for personal use, in our book, magazine, paper, or your blog. Too many people just don’t understand this and it can come back and cost them. The US Copyright Office is beta testing software right now to make it much easier to submit visual (such as photos) to them. Once this is in place I plan on submitting most of my images to them. Once an image is registered with them it is much easier to sue for copyright infringement. In most cases, if someone is caught using an image against copyright the typical award given to the copyright holder is 3 times the normal usage fee, plus legal expenses.

So, my point, be ethical even if you don’t shoot images, don’t steal them or manipulate people into think they are something they are not. More on this later.

BR

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 4:08 pm. It is filed under journalism, life, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.