Faked Photos – Some Context

The Shape of Days has a post up explaining how freelance photographers work. Interviewing a working freelance photographer, Diana Bondareff, Jeff Harrell gives us some background and context of how the business operates.

I asked Diane who writes the captions for her photos, whether she writes them herself or they’re written by an editor at the bureau. I was surprised — but, in retrospect, shouldn’t have been — to learn that the answer is both. “My caption is basically who, what, where and when,” she said, “and I keep the caption as generic as possible.” If there’s relevant information beyond what Diane provides, she said an editor will expand the caption.

For example, her caption might read, “Traders work on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006, in New York.” The bureau business editor might add, “Crude oil and gasoline prices rose sharply Wednesday after a government report showed that U.S. crude and gasoline inventories fell last week, and as a tropical storm gained strength in the Caribbean.”

In other words, the photographer documents the facts of the picture in the caption, while the editor adds context.

I next asked Diane what kind of post-processing she does to her photos, whether she uses Photoshop at all, and if so to what extent.

In short, Diane said, she will “only adjust what can be done easily in a darkroom to a film negative — lightness, contrast, dust and cropping.” She said that she will use Photoshop tools to remove dust and scratches from her photographs — even in the age of shooting digital, dust and scratches can still creep into photographs.

She also said that she’ll use Photoshop’s “unsharp mask” operation to improve the focus of a soft photo, “but maybe some other shooters wouldn’t even do that.”

As Harrell says we know a lot more of the how by will probably never know they why of Adnan Hajj's – and Reuters' – meltdown. The post is worth a read just to get a feel for the business.