not teaching,
still THINKING …
Freedom comes with choices, but how to know the right choice to make?
Since all of us share and view so many photos a day, here are 5 tips for good choices that benefit everyone.
- Do not electronically delete a person from the middle of a photo as if the person were never there.
- Do not remove an object — such as an unsightly trash can — between two people in a photo as if the trash can were never there.
- Do not delete a wide gap between two people in a photo to make it appear that the two people are standing closer together.
- Do not darken or lighten an image so much that people or objects in the image are no longer visible, as if they are not there.
- Do not reverse or “flop” an image so that, for example, a person is facing left instead of right.
Editing photos is so easy to do, and there is nothing wrong with cropping — deleting — the outside edges of a photo to focus more closely on the image we see.
But just as we don’t like to be tricked by others, we must be sure that any alterations we make to our own photos do not deceive the viewer.
That’s the best choice, always.
(These two profs are no longer teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, but we are still thinking.)