Charles Apple

Monday, I posted a page from the Sun Journal of Lewiston, Maine, circulation 34,035.

That’s a paper I’ve long admired, going back to the days of Paul Wallen. And, before him, Tim Frank. Last summer, in fact, I named it as one of the 13 must-watch papers for folks looking for ways to get maximum impact out of local photography.

When I posted it, I liked the way the designer cropped in tight on the picture of gold medal-winning skier Bode Miller. My original writeup talked about how Bode just leaped off the page here:

I finished my post, punched the button to toss it into the blog and then I tweeted it. As is my custom.

A few minutes later, though, I suddenly noticed something I hadn’t before. Namely, that Lewiston had used the same exact picture as did the Arizona Republic:

The reason I hadn’t noticed it was the same photo was the background. In the Sun Journal, the background was nearly totally black. But in the Republic, the background was much, much lighter.

I thought the photos were totally different frames by the same shooter — Charlie Krupa of the Associated Press — but no such luck.

Here are the two pictures side-by-side, with the Republic’s version (left) cropped to match the Sun Journal’s version (right; click either one for a larger view):

My conclusion, of course: The photo on the right was cut out and the background darkened to turn it nearly into a black box. And while I don’t mind doing something like this with file art for a feature treatment, I draw the line at manipulating a news photo, shot on cycle, in this way.

So I reopened my post and I rewrote two or three paragraphs to criticize what I thought the Sun Journal had done here.

I had already mentioned the paper by name on Twitter as one of the better pages of the day. I considered a follow-up tweet to reflect my update but decided to let it slide. My original post had only been up for a few minutes anyway.

So imagine my chagrin today when I heard from the Sun Journal designer:

I don’t mind your criticism of my page, but I didn’t cut out the photo and put it on a black box. I don’t have time for that stuff. I did put the type over the photo, but that’s all.

Egads!

So I went back today and looked very closely at both electronic versions of this picture, in both the JPG and PDF formats I pulled Monday from the Newseum. And I’ve determined that I don’t have nearly enough evidence here to support the accusation I made Monday. In fact, note how the Lewiston page is much more saturated than the Phoenix page:

Why is it more saturated? I don’t know. It just is. That’s the way it came in from the Newseum. The point, though, is if the saturation is off, then perhaps the contrast is off, as well. Perhaps the background on these two versions of the same picture does match. Perhaps we can’t see the match because we’re looking through the prism of electronic copies of print pages.

No matter what the reason, I’m convinced. I was wrong. And I offer my apology to the Sun Journal.

Good job, Lewiston.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Photojournalism, Sports design, Visual ethics, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.