Oh, Bowfinger, it's rare such material is made available. Earlier in the thread you called me a hypocrite.
And I remembered this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2276748&highlight=paul+ryan+soup
And look what I found:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34100548&postcount=46
You call Ryan dishonest, which he was and yet despite an apparent problem with him staging a scene you have no issue with outright doctoring of a photograph, placing people within it who were never there.
The fact you say in your original post is too funny. It's like you were deliberately setting yourself up to own yourself in this thread that didn't yet exist. Well done, sir. :thumbsup:
My apologies. I'd always had a vague impression you were reasonably intelligent, though your compulsive stalking of Dave was rather creepy. I've apparently overestimated you.
In the Ryan case (based on the information we had at that time), we had Ryan deliberately staging a phony event for his direct personal gain. His photo was used as campaign propaganda, to use deception to try to persuade voters to vote for him.
What does Pelosi gain? In this Pelosi group photo, explain how Pelosi is trying to benefit from this photo. She wanted to create a picture of all of the Democratic women of Congress. As so many others have pointed out, she wasn't trying to show "all of the women standing on these steps at this exact moment." Nobody cares about that. Pelosi was only trying to show all of the Democratic women in Congress today, that's all she ever claimed the photo showed, and that is exactly what the photo shows. It is completely different from Ryan staging a phony scene for personal gain.
By the way, if you crawled out of Mommy's basement you'd know this is a common practice, especially today with tools like Photoshop making it so easy. It is common to complete a group photo by adding missing members later, or sometimes combining elements of two or more photos to get the best bits of both. Yes, this is considered unethical for journalism, but for other, social purposes it's an accepted practice. It's often impractical to get everyone in the same room at the same time for corporate photos, class photos, those sorts of things. People increasingly do it for family photos, e.g., for a family Christmas card. I've even heard of wedding photographers using composites for group photos. In short, your vision of what photography entails is either uninformed or conveniently partisan.