Christine Chang Photography

The recent headlines in the world of photojournalism is an issue of ethics. Allan Detrich resigned this past saturday as staff photographer. You can search his name on the internet to get the full details, but basically he resigned because he was “caught” erasing something in his picture. It was a baseball picture and there were a pair of legs hidden behind a banner and he erased it so that all that was left was a fence and grass. He claimed that it was a mistake; he erased the legs for his own files and didn’t for the paper so it was an accident and he sent the wrong file.

As a photojournalist, I usually get two reactions. You either love me or you hate me. I’ve had people offer to give me things (like a bouquet of tulips; after refusing for the tenth time I took it to the office for everyone), and I’ve had people refuse to speak to me even though someone invited me to the event for press coverage. I get emails from people thanking me for everything; one person loved the pictures enough to take the whole supply of newspaper out of the hotel and take it all to New Zealand.

All of this is part of the job and I enjoy interacting with people, but one of the things I would like to be known most is that through pictures, I tell the truth. I have been schooled by professionals who tell me that besides cropping, and a bit of color correction, I am absolutely not allowed to do anything else to the picture. I can’t even tell someone to move. I have to move to catch a different angle, or I have to shoot with whatever is in the frame. I can crop something out, but erasing anything via photoshop is out of the question.

Of course, there are the set up pictures. Food lined up in a question mark on a plate. A portrait where I tell the subject to look my way. But everything else should be what I am seeing through the camera lens.

I don’t even remove objects in my pictures even for personal files. That mistake can be costly. I want my pictures to make a difference. If that means highlighing social ills that need to be fixed or emphasizing a good deed of a person, I want to carry a reputation so that there will be no doubt that I am telling the truth about the current state of society.

Besides, now that I use aperture, I find that I have little use for photoshop anymore in terms of newspaper pictures, all of the cropping and color correction tools are included with Aperture 1.5.

By the way, Aperture 1.5 is great and I love the program. The learning curve is a little steep but once you get it it makes life much easier.