The Sacramento Bee fired longtime photographer Bryan Patrick on Friday for violating the paper's ethics policy forbidding manipulation of documentary photographs.
Patrick digitally manipulated a photograph that was published Sunday on Page B1. The photograph was taken during the Galt Winter Bird Festival and showed a snowy egret trying to steal a frog from a great egret. In the original photograph, the frog was not as visible, so Patrick merged in a different image of the great egret.
Editors learned of the problem when a reader emailed, suggesting the image had been digitally altered.
After The Bee published a correction and apology online Wednesday and in print Thursday, editors reviewed a selection of Patrick's work and found two additional digital alterations that violate The Bee's standards.
In one image published in a photo gallery at sacbee.com in September of a lone person in a sunflower field, Patrick removed the shadow of his camera and arm from the photograph, inserting sunflowers in its place.
In a 2009 photograph of the Auburn wildfire that was published unaltered in the newspaper, Patrick subtly enlarged the flames in the photograph submitted for a winning entry to the San Francisco Bay Area Press Photographers Association annual contest. An anonymous email to The Bee late Thursday cast suspicion on that photograph.
The Bee's ethics policy and style guide prohibit such alteration, saying, "To maintain the credibility of The Sacramento Bee, documentary photographs will not be manipulated in any way that alters the reality of the image."
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– Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar
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