Seeing Ain’t Believing in the Digital Age

This past Sunday I went to my brother Greg’s house for hamburgers, hotdogs, and salad stuff from the garden. After dinner, we sat around his yard in Triplett and commented on the recent spell of hot weather we’ve had in the mountains.

Like I always say, everyone talks about the weather…but no one ever does anything about it.

Anyway, it was a little after dinner when I spotted it. There, on a stone and cement wall was a little spider with a child’s face on its abdomen. I showed it to the rest of the family and then took a couple of photos of it, just to see how they would turn out.

Some people see the face of a little girl in the back of this spider while others see a shrunken head. What do you see? Photo by Jeff Eason

As it turns out, one or two of the photos turned out great. You can distinctly make out where the eyebrows, eyes, nostrils and mouth of the little face are located on the spider’s belly. We jokingly said that the spider image resembled the face of Greg’s daughter, my niece Eliza. She was not amused.

The spider image reminded me of all those “miracles” where the image of Jesus, the blessed Virgin Mary, or one of the saints pop up in a corn tortilla or on the stained plaster of a wall. About once a year a story emerges from some part of the world where such an image has caused a ruckus. Faithful folks travel many miles to see the face of their favorite religious icons as they appear on the top of freshly baked food items.

I think we’re just hard-wired imagination-wise to see faces in just about everything. You can see them in the clouds in the sky, in the knotty pine paneling of cabin walls, and on the surface of the full moon. It’s our mind’s way of relating something new to something we’ve seen before, the same way the Lower Peninsula of Michigan looks like a mitten and Italy looks like a high-heeled boot.

I showed my spider photo to several people around the office. Every one of them saw the child’s face in the abdomen, despite the fact that it is actually light and dark patches of spider exoskeleton that they are looking at. A few people were skeptical as to whether the photo in question had been doctored to look that way. That’s an honest skepticism borne from our place in the digital age.

As recently as a decade-and-a-half ago, you had know your way around a darkroom if you wanted to manipulate a photograph. Even for basic tasks such as cropping a picture and changing its brightness and contrast, a photo expert was usually required to do the work.

Today, digital photography has surpassed film photography as the medium of choice for the public in general and photojournalists in particular. With software such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, even the novice shutterbug can change colors, eliminate that dreaded red-eye, and combine images from separate photographs.

All of this new technology can be really tempting to use, especially if you are trying to pair your news story with the perfect image. But, as recent events have shown us, newspaper folks need to be very careful with their use of digital technology when it comes to the photographs they publish.

The Charlotte Observer fired its award-winning photographer Patrick Schneider last Friday for digitally manipulating the colors in a photo that appeared in last Thursday’s newspaper. In the photo in question, a firefighter is shown silhouetted against the sun and a vivid crimson sky. The Observer published the photo in color on the front of its local news section.

Well, it turns out that the sky was more of a brownish gray (we call that taupe) that morning. In an apology to the public, editor Rich Thames wrote, “Enhanced with photo-editing software, the sky became a deep red and the sun took on a more distinct halo. Schneider said he did not intend to mislead readers, only 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.”

Upon first hearing of the incident, it seemed to me that losing one’s job was an overly severe punishment for adding color to the sky in a photograph. It was, however, against the Observer’s written policy forbidding photographers from manipulating images, except for small adjustments of brightness and contrast. Schneider’s violation of that policy last week was also not the first time that he had put his butt in his boss’s wringer because of digital manipulation.

In 2003 the North Carolina Press Photographers Association (NCPPA) rescinded three Pictures of the Year awards given to Schneider and The Charlotte Observer after determining that he had used excessive digital editing. In one poignant shot of two mournful policeman, the two men had been “cut out” to eliminate background elements such as a parking lot, fences and people that would have distracted from the photograph’s impact and power. Another one was a sunrise photo that NCPPA board member Chuck Liddy called, “basically a made up picture. The only color in that picture was blue sky at the top and the sun was a white color. That was a total fabrication as far as I’m concerned.”

In order to earn our readers’ trust, we here in the newspaper businesses need to remember that a picture is worth a thousand words. We go to great lengths to ensure that our words are based in truth and we must do the same thing to make sure that our photographs are not misleading.

Last year I covered a story about kids who were involved with a science fair at one of the elementary schools in Watauga County. The main photograph for the story was a group shot of about thirty kids who had won prizes at the science fair. Shortly before the publication of the story, I got a phone call from one of the school officials who told me that they could not find a parental permission slip for one of the kids in the photograph.

The lack of parental permission for the school to have the child’s photograph appear in the local newspaper left me with three choices: I could run the story without the photograph. I could wait and run the story next week when I might have parental permission. Or, since I knew which kid it was in the photograph, I could digitally alter the photograph so you couldn’t identify the kid in question.

I chose to sit on the story for a week and run the risk that another newspaper would beat me to the punch. Lo and behold, by the next issue’s deadline, school officials had contacted the child’s parents and gained permission to use his photo.

I know I made the right choice for a number of reasons. All of the winners of the science fair were able to show their bright and smiling faces in the newspaper. And the photograph was not in any manner misleading to our readers.

The same goes for this spider shot, whether you believe it or not!