Um spoiler alert for an already aired episode of CSI.

Thanks to CBS on demand (and the insane amount of money I pay each month for digital cable) I watched Thursday night's episode of CSI this morning. The episode is called "Happenstance" but since it's already aired I'd like to rename it "The Photographer Did it!" As an episode of CSI it had had the requisite twists and turns but the main point is a photojournalist murder his editor to keep her from spilling the beans that his Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of American soldiers in Iraq was actually a composite. He'd taken a bunch of boring, mundane stuff and pasted it together to create one dynamic shot.

It made for a good storyline on CSI but this is actually a very serious topic that working photographers and anyone buying photography has to deal with. Earlier this year Reuters fired a freelance photographer in Lebanon for significantly digitally altering his photographs that many felt changed the context and meaning of the events in the photos. The Charlotte Observer fired a photographer over the summer for altering the colors of a sunset in one of his photos. The photographer said he made the edits to make the colors in the photograph more true to how they actually were. In other words he was trying to improve upon the limitations of photography not change the meaning of the photo or deceive anyone.

In some of my portrait work I've done some serious photo editing to soften backgrounds, increase shadows, etc and the photographs have benefited from it and my clients were very happy. I don't discuss what levels of photo editing have taken place with the client not because I want to deceive or trick them, they simply aren't interested. They want to see the end product not all the steps and processes that lead up to it and they want that end product to make them (or their child) look interesting and beautiful. Photojournalism is a whole different ball of wax. Lots of magazines and newspapers have written guidelines and rules on what is considered acceptable photo editing but as technology improves it's going to be harder and harder to figure out what is Photoshopped, what is real and what the difference truly is.