An ABC News broadcast brought this subject to mind.

A recent investigation looked at the degree that advertising and magazines recreate images via photo software programs.  I am speaking firstly about the super-human qualities given celebrities and models.  The effect of this creation of a phony world of human beings who are beautiful people beyond reality, is having a devastating effect, especially on young girls.  Eating disorders are on the rise.  Nobody can meet these standards.  Actually digitally removing another 3 inches from the waste of already anemic appearing woman is virtually a promotional ad in favor of Bulimia.  Skin that is beyond anything human.  Maybe we can start little five-year old Julie on Botox by the time she is seven.

I know better than to expect the advertising industry to care about the plight of young girls but what about the magazine (editorial) industry?   Most of us remember when National Geographic Magazine actually digitally moved one of the pyramids (yes those pyramids) to make a more attractive magazine cover.  The world was aghast and photoshopping in magazines ceased.   The new stakes are much higher.

Who does get to decide what the perfect woman or man should look like.  A woman of five foot eleven and 90 pounds?   A man with 50 inch biceps and a 20 inch waste?  Perfect faces?  Maybe a blond-haired blue-eyed Arian race?  The truth is (in my opinion) the humanoids that are being created with photoshop are freaks, but to many impressionable young girls they are the standard to aspire to.

As a one time nature photographer my personal interests have always been with photoshop in stock nature photography.  How manipulated are the images being used in magazines and books?  Note that it is the photographers altering images not the publications.  Most magazine and book publishers have an ethics statement in reference to manipulated images.  These magazines do represent photojournalism, not beauty contests.

Everybody clearly has the right to do whatever they want with their own images.  Manipulate or not, it is your decision.  There are many varying opinions on how much is too much anyway.  I alter images more than some people would appreciate.  If there is an out of focus bit of foliage in my image, and it rests between the camera and a wildlife subject, I won’t hesitate to remove it.  It is unrecognizable and therefore imparts no useful natural history information and certainly does not (in my opinion) add anything to the art of an image.  Some images I may take a little further but I try to mention that fact.

I have written much about the artistic value of clean and simple images.  Less is more.  Just the same I have made (and shared) many images of a lot of nature’s less attractive plant life.  Especially when I can place a wild animal in its natural wild surroundings.  I photograph and show birds in molt or bothered by mites.  Mammals with mange, or infected by Sand Flies.  It is simple to photograph the clean and beautiful and also the less attractive parts in nature.  You just photograph all that you find.  You can create art with one image and tell the  story of nature with another.

As more photographers severely alter images for their own use, my fear is that those photographers will become the stock photographers of the future.  Too many photographers copy the examples set by others.  In the 1980s a landscape photographer was fined for cutting down a small sapling in a California N.P.  The tree wasn’t in the way.  He had an Ansel Adams picture with him and it was made in 1949.  The sapling was not there in 1949 and he wanted to be as good as Ansel Adams.  He admitted he had done things like this before as he traveled America trying to make the same pictures that Ansel had made.  At least Ansel was a great man.   There is one well-known photographer and workshop teacher who teaches hundreds of future photographers to not only remove and reconstruct everything in the picture frame, but to rebuild any flaws in their wildlife subjects as well.  This includes creating a new wing if you cut it off photographically.  It is those of you yelling wow, cool, that worry me.  Photographic greed can be ugly. Once your images make their way into magazines, it is no longer only about you.  The truth is (in my opinion) that viewing those images made perfect by manipulation, can become boring after a while.

When to manipulate an image and how far to go will always vary from photographer to photographer.  I admit that I have a fear of future generations of magazine/book readers, never getting to see the whole story of nature.  There is no subject I can think of that should be perpetually cleansed with no educational value.  We learn only by viewing all of the facts on any given subject.

Please note that the lack of capitalization of the word that defines this post is intentional and is done for legal reasons.  The term is in fact often a verb in this article.

Happy shooting and sensible photoshopping to each of you