Xjyuk

This question came to my mind when I asked this question. Kindly have a look on it and the accepted answer there.

You'll see:

1. Photo is cropped


2. A white vertical bar thing is hidden


3. A pipe nearby the leaf is hidden (right bottom corner)


4. Background is blurred

I like all of those changes. It definitely makes the leaf it better. But now I have a doubt that little bit kills me. Is it moral to do such things in Photo? I read answers on a similar question but this type of editing was not discussed much there (although I assume they support such editing).

Or you should already take care of objects, unnecessary objects, main objects and other things, before taking photo, which will make photo better?

It depends on the intent. If the goal, and actual result is "art", i.e make a nice-looking thing, then anything is acceptable. If the goal is to make the picture be a fake proof that something happened (for instance, removing Angela Merkel from a group of heads of state) then it is much more open to debate. But there is no hard rule, it could depend on the intent[*].

[*] in the case of Mrs. Merkel, it was for a newspaper read by people who find any pictures of any women offensive.

Artistic photography follows the beauty is in the eye of the beholder ethos. There is nothing inherently immoral about it.

Photography that is meant to make a political statement or journal actual events is held to a much different standard. Take this example:

The depiction is of an actual event, the right person attacking the left. However, the lighting and framing being captured on film makes the scene appear exactly the opposite.

Context is vitally important in how we judge what we see, and as photographers, we have the ability to change that context through the use of our framing. Any image captured that is used to interpret an event that leads people to a conclusion about that event that would differ from those that were actually there is an immoral image.

As a journalist, your job is to document history and relay it to others - and that is a vitally important task. If you are building a story to fit your own conclusion, then you're an activist, not a journalist, and passing your imagery off as truth is, indeed, immoral.

An example if it is moral to change photos is the very much discussed photographing of models which are photoshopped to look slimmer, have small (or big) body properties removed or masked. What can be done in photoshop can be done too with filters for example, like using a soft filter for a face.

Is it moral to make (photograph) or adapt (photoshop) pictures of beautiful models who are in real life not so perfect, but send a signal that girls who do not look like a model get psychological problems?

Or what about photography tricks to photograph food? I once read that food looks better photographed when it is frozen (even when that type of food should never be frozen). So it gives some kind of 'fake' reality.

For the photographer, the intention is to make pictures more beautiful, or in other cases, more intense. What the users (or companies) of the pictures do with it or how it affects the audience is a neverending story.

How does moral play into it? Is it immoral to do studio recordings of songs rather than live recordings? It's not immoral as much as different unless you hand in a recording as proof of your skills when applying to a band without mentioning the editing. Or in your case, when applying for a job as field photographer.

At any rate, the less you depend on manipulations, the more reserves you have for doing the manipulations where it counts. And elements of a photograph that are actual parts of the photograph tend to have a lot more detail and depth than you can achieve with a reasonable amount of effort in post-editing. Fix the exposure after the fact, and you get quite more noise than if you worked from proper exposure (or overdone but not blown-out exposure) to start with. Proper background blur involves elements that would actually be invisible if you tried creating them from a sharp photograph. Cf for example, the highlights on the whisker behind the fork in the following photograph: on some highlights the center where it originates is not even visible, so you cannot expect to recreate those bokeh circles from a photograph with large depth of field.