ALTERED PHOTOS

ALTERED PHOTOS— Newspapers are notoriously and rightly worried in this age of digital photos about altered photos. Last year some important news organizations were made fools of when a stringer covering the Israeli-Lebanon war altered photos by adding smoke to make it look as though the Israelis had indiscriminately bombed Beurut. This is fairly easy to do using Adobe Photoshop using something called “The Cloning Tool.”

This week someone tried to pull a fast one on The Roadrunner. We were sent a photo of some school children (I won’t say what children or what school). A figure in the original photo was airbrushed out for unknown reasons. The photo was emailed to us and we prepared to put it into the paper when we were contacted by the person who took the photo. He wanted to replace the photo because he discovered that his work had been altered!

Amazing! That in a small town like this someone would think it’s appropriate to remove someone from a photo and try to palm it off on us. I can’t think of any explanation that would justify this. Can you?