Photoshopped Image Wins Nikon Photography Contest on Instagram
No matter how impressive you might make an image look on Photoshop, it will never be a patch on one that looked like that before it was ever edited. Admittedly, you're far less likely to snap a picture of a seven-headed dragon orbiting a supernova in real life, but the art of photography comes principally from capturing a moment, freezing it in time, not making one up.
That's not to say there's no legitimacy to photoshop manipulation as an art form, but it's not really the kind of art people should be submitting into standard photo contests, especially without disclosing the fact that the image is doctored, but imagine if that happened, and said image ended up winning. Thanks to Nikon, we don't have to, it happened last week.
For the January edition of their monthly Nikon Captures contest, the company asked people to send in their best monochrome shots. The turnout was impressive, to say the least, but the prize ultimately went to Singaporean photographer Chay Yu Wei, with an image entitled 'Look Up'. Pictured below, it features an enclosed ladder, with a plane flying across the skyline above, framed perfectly within the ladder's surrounding cage. It wasn't long before photographers on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook all starting singing the same tune: the plane had been photoshopped in.
On its own, that doesn't sound so bad, what makes it worse is that the plane was edited in so badly that even the quality of the photoshopping couldn't be complemented. What makes it even worse still is that an almost identical image had been posted by another Instagram user about a year previous, but that user had never submitted his image to a contest, or made any secret of the fact that it was a composite. Guess what though, it gets even even worse. 2 months after the original plane image appeared, Yu Wei posted another virtually identical one, meaning that he had not only copied the idea from another user, but that he'd done it twice.
He has since apologised to his followers for the mishap, within which he reveals that the image was not edited with Photoshop, but rather with the far more limited PicsArt. He also repeatedly asserts that it was only ever meant jokingly, and that his error was entering it into the competition, more than anything else. Whether or not you want to grant him the benefit of the doubt, it's really Nikon who come out of this the worst, as it's evidence that their judging process for this particular contest was, at best, half-arsed.
Callum is a film school graduate who is now making a name for himself as a journalist and content writer. His vices include flat whites and 90s hip-hop. Follow him @CallumAtSMF
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Photoshopped Image Wins Nikon Photography Contest on Instagram
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Wednesday, February 03, 2016
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Reviewed by Unknown
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Wednesday, February 03, 2016
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