Spring Checklist

Altered Reality & Ethics In Nature Photography

There’s a question we hear a lot these days; it goes something like this: “I enjoy participating in photo competitions and have been fairly successful. Some colleagues maintain I could improve my competitiveness by employing post-capture manipulations, such as adding subjects and color, to make my photographs more artistic. Because I consider myself to be a nature photographer, I’m troubled by the idea of manipulating images in that way. What’s the standard you recommend?”

There are at least two answers. My own standard, and one that’s usually applied in major competitions where I serve as a judge, is that post-capture processing is an essential part of digital photography, particularly when images are captured in RAW format. To achieve the most perfect possible representation of reality, images can be adjusted for sharpness and detail, dynamic range, white balance and gamut, basic composition (cropping), and removal of extraneous debris, such as random sticks and reflections. The key is to avoid misrepresentation of the environment or the subject.