Problems of modern photojournalism in the context of digital photography technologies progress

Modern digital technologies have radically changed the photographing process.Revolutionary changes in the technical sphere have led to radical transformations of everythingconnected with the photo. Computer processing of images has extraordinary expanded the limits of thepossible in modern photo, made almost any creative plan that sets the photographer really free increation of photos as works of art realizable.But technical progress in photography is accompanied with a variety of negative phenomena. Theseeming ease of taking a digital photo in combination with an insufficiently high general level ofculture promotes the fact that often neither photographers, nor consumers appear are capable todistinguish a good photo from the mediocre. Today an obviously expressed recourse of the aesthetic ofthe mass photo, the level of professionalism of photographers in whole and newspaper photographersin particular is observed. More often mass media publish photos that are of poor quality in the pictorialaspect. Good pictures dissolve in huge numbers of bad ones; diverse technical and creative tools ofshooting and processing of pictures that have little in common with art are becoming trendy, such ascamera tilting, leading to displacement of horizontal and vertical lines, vignetting, unreasonable localblurs of separate areas of the image, etc.The tendency of spread of the specified negative tendencies among professional newspaperphotographers especially appreciable in regional and corporate editions is observed. The fact that somesmall newspapers dismiss press photographers and assign their functions to writing journalists with nodue training results in poor-quality photos on pages of most diverse editions. And, as they still are theaesthetic reference point for readers, it leads to a subsequent lesser quality of the mass photo. Thus, theprocess of interference of popular photos and photojournalism is observed.Any edition participates in the formation of value reference points of readers, the aesthetic onebeing among the majors. The decrease in quality of photos promotes degradation of taste of the readingaudience, decrease in mass cultural level, loss of value criteria.

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