Photographer Ethics: Should the camera never lie?

Two stories about Newspapers “doctoring” images, one laughable, the other more serious from The Digital Photography Weblog

the Charlotte Observer has sacked a staff photographer for altering the colour of an image to, as he states, “to restore the actual color of the sky”. He said the color was lost when he underexposed the photo to offset the glare of the sun.

OK this is plainly ridiculous, the “truth” of the story was restored by this superficial change, who cares what colour the sky was though really? So either way, an over reaction right? How about this one …

The Miami Herald’s Spanish-language sister paper acknowledged Friday that it manipulated two photos to make it appear that two Cuban police officers were ignoring prostitutes gesturing to a tourist.

In this one the image was intentionally created to show a false impression of Police neglect of the prostitute problem. As far as I can tell this photographer was not sacked.

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