Has anyone else been noticing this? I'm seeing frequent examples lately of quite dark photography in mainstream media outlets and I'm wondering if there is a technical reason or if there is something else going on. This picture was made in broad daylight on a cloudless day and yet the histogram is skewed heavily toward blackness. I'm seeing this from multiple news sources. Often in the same story there will be a quite dark image like the one below, but then there will be an image with normal illumination which highlights the issue.
This pic is from Faith Ninivaggi/Reuters/The Guardian:
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Hm... i get what you mean but as this picture was shot in broad daylight it has a high range of contrast. Shadows are very dark but still you can recognize the stones on the ground - while the white shirt or window frames are juuust not blown... so it could be this dark to not blow the highlights. You could do better, but this needed dodging and burning - and this would require time.
This picture probably was too unimportant in the context of the article to get a HDR makeover. Also it isn`t meant to advertise a special vacation place etc. - since digital does offer more possibilities in the post, we`re getting used to shiny HDR pictures and when we see an untreated picture we may consider it odd...
... but intentionally darkening pictures started decades ago. At the end of the 90s, early 2000s, these zombie- and vampire-movies came up - and woops movies got dark. You even can see this on the Harry Potter movies. The first movie was colorful (depending on the subject, there of course also are darker subjects, but as long as there is sunshine outside colors are bright), the second movie still was, but the third or fourth movie - where Hermione has this travel-back-in-time-amulet to visit more classes a day - colors get darker and less saturated throughout the movie. Stepless.
At the end of the movie, when they managed to prevent a bad thing to happen by this time-travel-armulet woops colors get a little better again - but they are not as good as in the first movie.
And in the following movies colors never "get well again". Though these movies are supposed for kids.
If you look at a 90s action movie, where a villain does steal an a-bomb or whatever, colors are much more vital than in this Harry Potter-kids-fairy-tale from middle to the end.
And since then, zombies, vampires, Harry Potter, colors go everywhere. Dark and de-saturated often goes throughout the entire movie - even if it`s not a horror-movie. Selecting colors regardless the topic seems to be normal today.
So who knows, maybe this picture was selected by someone who was a big Potter fan 20 years ago and does consider this "normal". If this picture was taken with a 20 year old digital camera, it could look just like this, as these cameras had problems in color reproduction and contrast range. Maybe this picture has such colors because someone had early-2000s-nostalgia - unconsciously.
But i get what you mean.