Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/08/30

[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]

Subject: Re: [Leica] Photo scandal at National Geographic!!!
From: Eric Welch <eric@jphotog.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 21:44:46 -0700

Jim,

That was a good read. But he messed up a story pretty bad. The missing 
diet coke can was not a Nobel Prize winner and it wasn't in 
Philadelphia. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner and it was in St. Louis.

What happened was an amateur photographer who won the prize with a 
photo of a firefighter and a child. What happened was a photographer 
wasn't paying close enough attention and when he photographed the 
prize-winner (I think he was a dentist) holding his photograph. The 
photographer didn't remove the diet coke can in the corner of the photo.

Back then the Post-Dispatch was using a $2 million dollar machine 
called a Scitex that takes two years to learn to use (the mouse had 
something like 25 buttons on it!!!) to process their photos for print. 
The photo editor showed the photo to the technician and pointed at the 
diet coke can and said "get rid of it." He meant to crop it. But the 
technician thought he meant to clone it out. And thus the whole thing 
was caused by a miscommunication.  At the time they didn't hire 
journalists to run the Scitex because it took over a year of training 
to master it.

I know the story because I took a tour of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 
shortly after the incident while I was in grad school in Columbia (MO) 
and they told us the story as we looked at the Scitex.

On Saturday, August 30, 2003, at 07:46  PM, Jim McIntyre wrote:

> Here's an interesting article, albeit a bit dated, concerning
> photojournalism and digital manipulation
>
> http://www.ryerson.ca/rrj/content/print/backissues/stanleigh.html

Eric Welch
Carlsbad, CA
http://www.jphotog.com

Never kick a cow chip on a hot day. - Will Rogers.

- --
To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html