Photographers Who Got Caught Cheating

winning a big photography competition can catapult your photography career to Great riches so it's no wonder that there are some photographers out there who will do whatever it takes to make sure that they win so a few weeks ago I actually wrote about this subject in My Weekly Newsletter and I got so many responses from people giving me other examples of photographers who've tried to cheat their way to Victory so let's begin the run down with this first example which I think is incredibly soft Oh and before I forget this video is sponsored by Squarespace I always forget that bit so this image was disqualified from the World Press photo competition and can you guess why because the photographer cloned out a tiny bit of a shoe or a foot that was in the background of this image I feel for this photographer I my middle name is spot remove actually no I got it changed to generative fill like I think the spot removal tool is the most powerful tool after the crop tool I don't think this is bad at all but obviously the rules of the photography competition dictate that you can't manipulate your photographs in any way shape or form I suppose but I don't know personally I thought this was a bit harsh but let me know what you think in the comments and by the way they get a lot lot worse than this next up we have another soft one but this one I suppose is open for debate what do you think because me personally again I'm with the photographer on this one in 2012 this image won the National Geographic photography competition won it the whole thing won but then was later disqualified do you know why well if we look at the original version of the image we can see on the right hand side of frame there is a bit of litter a plastic bag a bit of trash and the photographer cloned it out oh I just I am I am 100% with the photographer on this one I would have also cloned out the bag now whether or not that's breaking the rules is not up to me or the photographer that's down to the organizers of the photography competition but as an ethical thing to do in my opinion absolutely fine I think I don't think it's manipulation or cheating I just don't think I basically don't think he read the rules well well what do you think disqualified or not now this next image makes no sense at all so this incredibly dramatic photograph of an elephant was disqualified because of image manipulation now I know what you're thinking but you're wrong so this image won the photographer the title of Africa Geographic photographer of the year but unfortunately it was revoked when it was revealed that the photographer had actually tidied up the elephant's left ear so here is another photograph of the same elephant and if you look at its left ear you can see it's torn to shreds it's all it's all rough around the edges and in my opinion very characterful if you look at the left ear in the photographer's award-winning image you can see that it's all been cloned out and smoothed off now the bit that's so confusing about this is the photographer denies it and says that he accidentally fixed the elephant's ear now I don't know about you but I've never accidentally fixed or cloned something in or out of a photograph I'm always very intentional with my editing either way though I still think it's fairly minor to just fix a bit of an animal's ear but that that's coming from me Mr clone removal wait a minute news Justin we need to go back to the elephant image my wife has just come in as I'm mid recording this video and I showed her the example of the elephant ear that was cloned and we noticed actually the ear has not been tidied up at all the ears have been swapped if you look at this image of the same elephant you can click clearly see that the elephant's left ear has a big chunk missing out of it a very distinctive piece of Flesh missing and when you look at the left ear of the competition winning image of course that piece of flesh is no longer missing which leads us to believe it's being cloned out which is what that article I was reading suggested however just look at the elephant's other ear the right hand ear of the award-winning elephant has the distinctive piece of Flesh missing yet the tusks are the same so it's not like the image is being flipped the ears for some reason have been swapped over something's going on something fishy is going on with that elephant so quite rightly so it's been pointed out by the award organizers that it should be kicked out of the competition because man at first I thought it was just been a cloned out ear but actually no it's uh something much more than that man I can't wait to read the comments in this video right we're going to get on to the serious stuff now all of these images thus far I think have been pretty tame and I don't think they're cheating at all and you know it's I don't see anything wrong with them but coming up we are going to see some serious audacity but before we do that I need to thank the sponsor of this video which is Squarespace now if you don't know who Squarespace are they're an all-in-one website building platform and what that means basically is if you need your own website but you haven't got the skills to build it and code it yourself or perhaps you don't have the finances and the time to hire a web development company to do all for you well you can just do it yourself using squarespace's online drag and drop system it's intuitive you can register your own domain and if you've got all of your copy ready and all of your media ready you genuinely can knock up a professional looking website in 24 hours or less and if you get stuck they've got 24/7 customer support but I just recommend going on YouTube looking at a few tutor tutorials on how to build your Squarespace website and you will have a very fancy website with an online store an online Gallery can have your own members area there's tons basically everything you can do with a Bott day website you can do with a Squarespace website so go to squarespace.com heon and you'll get a free try and if you like that free trial use the offer code Heaton for 10% off your first purchase so we are ramping up the seriousness now and this one this one actually is my favorite and uh it's I'd say it's cheeky it's a bit more cheeky and is serious but this Photograph won a nickon photography competition so Nikon Singapore ran a photography competition called look up and this was the winning entry but let's just play with the levels of this Photograph and see if we can spot anything un oh my God yes the photographer has just cloned out an airplane and dropped it perfectly in the center space between those ladders on the photograph now now you could argue that he created this composite and just just dropped it into the competition without really giving it any thought and not checking the rules which you know we all know who reads the small print I certainly don't but the caption that came along with the photograph was something along the lines of oh my I was so surprised to see a plane fly straight overhead and I managed to capture it and the best thing about this cheating image is the internet memes that it created yeah definitely one of my favorites in this list and Incredibly cheeky but I don't know I still think harmless enough like I don't I'm not I'm not angered by it I just I just think it's funny right we are ramping up the scale of seriousness much further towards the top now Wildlife photography is a sacred thing you do not alter your wildlife images we've already seen this with the elephant's ear and if you enter into a prestigious Wildlife photography competition and you make any adjustments well you're going to be in big trouble seriously you should look at some of the terms and conditions of these Wildlife photography competitions you can't crop you can't clone anything out you can't even adjust your exposure to create let's say a highkey image you could do nothing you have to shoot 99% of the image in camera with only minor Minor Adjustments it's so strict which is why I have so much respect for those Wildlife photographers who win these big competitions now of course a lot of the photographers know about these rules and regulations and they're not going to try and pull the wool over the judge's eyes with a cleverly photoshopped images because of course the judges want the raw files well these next two photographers thought that they could cheat their way around the rules and uh well it's quite incredible so the Natural History Museum runs a wildlife photography competition it is incredibly prestigious and this was one of the winning images which was later disqualified so here we have a wonderful image of an Iberian wolf captured leaping over this fence but some people question this asking would the wolf in fact leap over the fence or is it more likely to squeeze between the gaps in the fence this aroused suspicion and some investigation was done and it turns out that this wolf is actually a tame trained wolf that you can hire for your own filming or photography purposes that's right a Wildlife photography competition winner was not Wildlife it was a trained wolf now I should say the photographer denies this however he was still stripped of his title now what gets me is this is a massive competition with like 94,000 entries or something like that so how would you feel if you'd missed out on a spot because somebody entered a fake image now of course the image isn't fake but you know it's not Wildlife is it now this next one is good oh this next one's so good now here again we have a wildlife photographer of the Year competition and this was the winning image which shows a beautifully captured anteater on a termites Mound where the termites are glowing green under a night sky oh it's just beautiful apart from the fact that it's a stuffed antier so it turns out that an anonymous source reported the imagees being fake and then the Natural History Museum to look into it and then experts were brought in and all kinds of like high like this went all the way to the top and as it transpired the antita is the same antia that sits at the entrance of the am I think that's how you pronounce to AAS EMAs National Park in Brazil so if you go to this National Park in Brazil and you're walk in and you get your ticket or whatever you're going to see this anti and his stuff that he'd taken it he'd put it in his frame and he'd taken the shot think no one would notice now of course I should say photographer denies this he says it's not the case and he did show three raw files the first raw file being an empty shot of a termite Mound the second raw file was the one that won the competition with the anti one the third raw file was again an empty termite Mound he says that the antita came in Stood Still for only enough time to take that one image and wondered off again and actually this is kind of plausible it really is if you think about it if you're taking a long exposure I don't know the settings of this image but let's just say it was 3 to 5 7 Seconds long I'm not sure and you're not going to take that long exposure whilst the antia is moving into frame because you know it's just going to be a blurry mess you're going to wait you're not going to move you're not going to breathe and then when the Ander gets into position oh you take your shot the first thing you're going to do is press the playback button on your camera look at it and go yes by which time the antier could have then just sced off and again you wouldn't take a photograph with the antita scurrying off so it actually does in my mind make sense that the photographer denies this and says he only has the one raw file he also had a witness to say that this happened but then when you look at the experts and The credibility of the experts who inspected the image and concluded that it was in fact the exact same antier as the one in the entrance of the national park well hey I don't know man it's open for debate do you know about this story and what do you think uh either way I I it's probably not funny for the photographer or for the other photographers who missed out on the top spot of that prestigious competition ah it's just funny I don't know I I just think all this is quite hilarious now we have a couple of images that were disqualified because it transpired that they were Ai and I'm not sure how to feel about this because here's a beautiful image of two Surfers paddling out over a swell and the breaking wave in the Sun and you look looking at you think oh my God what a shot well done that photographer well done you now the photograph won the competition and then a little while after the photographer came out and said actually you know what this was Ai and we have another story here almost exactly the same this photographer used this image and won the incredibly prestigious Sony World photography awards so I believe what happened in this case was he refused his award and said actually guys you need to sort out your stringent photography checking process for these Awards because this my friends is AI and I have done this to prove a point very similar to the last image with the surface but a much bigger photography competition now with this image we've got a bit of a plot twist there's a photography shop called Charing Cross photo and they ran a photography competition whereby this image was entered into it and then it was disqualified it was kicked out it was say you can't enter this Photograph into our competition because we don't accept AI entrances now the photographer quite rightly was perplexed by this because this is actually a phone shot taken of her son at some kind of art installation I'm not sure but it's a cool photograph I can see why the judges might have actually thought it was AI with the two mannequins there in the background but that's the problem with AI is that it's just going to cause suspicion it's like back in back in the day 10 years ago when you'd put up a full image and everyone would go oh Photoshop and now it's changed from our Photoshop to R AI so everyone's going to start assuming that your great image that you've captured is AI That's the biggest concern with AI for me I don't know what do you think are we going to have to start proving that our images are not is is the onus going to be on the photograph to say no no I am not guilty of AI is that where we're going a flipping open up I'm going to link to every article from every image below so you can read more about those images and hear the photographers side of the story and if you're struggling for those Christmas gifts I have a calendar available it's 12 of my landscape photography images taken in the past year or so each image has a QR code so you can scan that code and watch the Youtube video where the in see well yeah see exactly how the images were taken there we go thank you and [Music] goodbye oh

Channel: Thomas Heaton

Views: 704,199

Keywords: landscape photography, outdoor photography, landscape photography tutorial, landscape photography in the field, photography tips, best photo locations, how to landscape photography, hiking, outdoors, vanlife, mitsubishi delica, van life, camper van, photography road trip, road trip, van build, tiny van, 4x4 van build, how to take vehicle to Iceland, driving to Iceland

Id: WXAavnORAxg

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023