Three of the photos date from the Civil War. One is an iconic photo of Abraham Lincoln -- with Lincoln's head pasted on the body of John C. Calhoun. Another photo is supposed to show Ulysses S. Grant in front of his troops, but was actually made from three photos -- Grant's head on Alexander McCook's body using a background shot of Confederate prisoners of war. The third, a photo by Matthew Brady showing William T. Sherman with his subordinates, has a general that was added to the photo later.
There's a lot of interesting stuff here, including some dictators who had subordinates airbrushed out of existence, some political shenanigans, and plenty of minor manipulations that were done for editorial or artistic purposes. One of those is the famous photo from Kent State that shows Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the body of Jeremy Miller. That photo was altered to remove a fence post in the background that appeared to be growing out of Ms. Vecchio's head. The webpage even includes the latest kerfuffle, the Ralph Lauren ad that has been manipulated to the point where the model's head is bigger than her waist.
I consider myself more of a photographer than a photo editor, but I'm not a snob about it. I usually give my photos a little touch up with a simple editing program, usually Picasa. For example, the latest photo I posted, "Looking West," was touched up a little. I took the photo at the Lookout Mountain Flight Park. After an hour or two of taking shots of hang gliders, I was heading back to the car, camera in hand, when I saw the man on the launch ramp. I raised the camera, made a quick adjustment, took a quick shot and continued walking. I posted it to flickr, then used flickr's editing program, Picnic, to straighten the horizon a bit and play around with the color.
I've never owned or used Photoshop, but I love some of the artistic things you can do with it. It's more of a monetary issue with me; that's a damned expensive program. I downloaded Gimp and played around with it a bit, but couldn't figure out how to do too much with it. If there was some sort of step-by-step guide around, I might play around with it a little more. At this point though, I think I'd be better served to spend more time learning how to use my camera than learning how to edit. I would welcome other view on the matter though.
So where's the line? I'm sure there's a line there somewhere. I believe that any manipulation, except correcting for exposure and color, is unacceptable in the field of photo journalism. Even if your subject has a fence post growing out of her head. Manipulation seems quite acceptable in most other photo fields. It just drives me crazy when they get too carried away with it.
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