I posted this on my Fb page, so apologies to those here who also got it there.

I find it interesting the lengths some professional photographers go to with regards to editing their images.
A little colour correction and cropping/rotation would be perfectly acceptable to me, but to submit an image that has obviously had so much post processing as an entry in a competition would never occur to me.
As one commentator put it (and I actually agree with) "We all crop now and again, but come on, this is a bit of a joke. Had he went in tight in the first instance and retouched the image to remove the foot fair enough, but this is a case of trying to salvage a 'decent image' from what was a non starter in the first place."
BJP clicky

Mark

Agreed.

It was a crap photo.

That photographer is taking the piss.

That crop is what.. 10% of the original photo if that! Thats a disgrace. I'm not even against editing as such but that crap could have been snapped on a mobile phone with zero effort and thought and photoshop'd into an entry. Not a good one at that.

Meh.
We live in a digital age, and if you have the tools to re-invent your work as you see fit, then I don't see why you shouldn't make full use of that capacity.
Otherwise, if you feel that you should never crop, always frame your work exactly and take a WYSIWYG approach, then I'd suggest picking up a 35mm body and getting on with it.
I'm on the photographers side on this one, otherwise the rules should have been more explicit in what they were asking.

Removing a speck of dust is one thing I suppose, but a foot. How about enlarging the moon like in Bruce Almighty, where would it end?



Are these accepted standards set in stone, or do they evolve with the industry? There was a mention of different expectations to portrait and news.

I agree with Alex. For making an image in general, use the tools in your box, that's what they're for. However, for a competition the rules aim to give a level playing field; there may have been other entries that would have done better had they applied the same level of editing but they did not as they considered it to be against the rules of the competition and therefore unfair. Evidently the Rules need to be clarified.

For me its not about the rules or the digital workshop. I fully embrace digital photography. The thing I personally dont like about this photo is the original is crap. Like really bad. Its got nothing. The entry though is a 10% (or something) crop of this crap photo edited and polished to look something half right. The 'skill' in this image is purely one of being able to control a mouse and absolutely nothing to do with operating a camera.

That's a fair point - I'd have been more impressed if the submitted image had been taken on something like Kodak T-Max with a 35mm body. That'd be awesome.
I still like the image he submitted, and it's interesting that he's looked at the image he's taken and spotted the moment he should have got on the day.

However, is this approach of being highly selective in order to rescue a picture terribly different to the rise of photographers using an HD camera to shoot with and then selecting their favourite frame? An image taken in this way has been on the cover of Esquire, after all. I'd take that as an implicit industrial support for the practice.

I'm not so sure that one example can speak for a whole industry.

Mark

Perhaps not yet, but it's apparently the way the wind's blowing, if the trade press is to be believed.

I'm not a traditionalist by any stretch but I just like to get as much as possible right in the camera. If I'm going to heavily editing something its normally to create 'digital art' like some strange portraits I did of Nicola I posted in the Random Photo thread. I dont know. I'm a bit meh about the whole thing.

Why? You can do just as much post processing on a scanned 35mm frame as you can on a digital file. What's wrong with taking the same approach with digital? I didn't switch to digital because it allowed me to crop my images, I switched because the cost of film and processing, and the time spent scanning, were becoming a drain. It took me longer to get a scan the right balance than it does to glance through my RAW files in Lightroom.

In the case of the cropped photograph being discussed, the disqualification was not because he cropped the image, but because he cloned out a foot belonging to someone in the original who wasn't visible in the crop. If he had taken just a second more time over the composition of the photo, he could have concealed the foot behind the subject's hand in the first place. To me, that's just lazy.

There's nothing wrong with taking the same approach with digital, I'm all for it, as you know.
I hate having to spend time on the computer adjusting a shot - maybe I'm lazy, but I prefer getting it right in the camera first time, thinking it through in the moment rather than fiddling about in Lr.
What I had in mind when I made that comment was the Cartier-Bresson school of thought, where accurately capturing the moment as perfectly as possible is ultimate.



Now, you can agree or disagree with the sentiment, but that's what I had in the back of my mind when I made the comment.

I'd argue you get far more freedom (not just with your time) with a RAW file, in terms of simplicity of the edit, than you do with a neg scan. Things like the channel management for one. I think the way that the time required to get from camera to finished image with a RAW file vs neg does mean it's become easier, more streamlined, and as a result encourages radical interpretation of an image if the user wishes.

What I love about a neg is it's fixed nature, which is quite different to RAW, and it's 'data dump, sort it out later' approach.

I don't think there's a wrong or right answer, it's just a matter of opinion, based on the work you do. It'd be very boring if we were all shooting in the same way.

Exactly - there's no right or wrong. I agree with M. Cartier-Bresson - I crop/adjust as little as possible once I've taken the picture, but I think there's more to the difference between film and digital than the post-processing flexibility of digi.