So there I was, paging through the winners of the 2008 National Geographic photography contest and when I came across this one I started wondering…

National Geographic Places winner

Something just wasn’t right, but it took me a while to put my finger on it. And then it struck me: the reflection is not a reflection. The clouds continue in the water, they don’t reflect in the water!

Here’s a reputable institute like National Geographic, organizing a yearly reputable Photography contest with reputable photographers as participants and judges. And they allow a photograph made in Photoshop to win a category? How wrong is that really?

The photographer just shot a picture of a sky (I hope, at least, pictures of a sky are so easy to come by through other means these days, I surely hope he won’t be caught on both cheating AND copyright infringement…) and a picture of some water with some boats on it and combined them in Photoshop.
It’s a gorgeous image, you have to give him that, but National Geographic should never have allowed this to go through in this category. As per their rules for entry:

Minor burning, dodging and/or color correction is acceptable. Hand tinting is acceptable, as is cropping. Fish-eye lenses are acceptable. High dynamic range images (HDRI) and stitched panoramas are acceptable only if the combined parts are all made around the same time. For more information, please read Director of Photography David Griffin’s comments on image manipulation. Any changes to the original Photograph not itemized here are unacceptable and will render the Photograph ineligible for a prize.

I stumbled across a great blog called Photoshop Disasters. Its writer was supplied with a hilarious image by one of its readers and I just have to put it here (image courtesy of Photoshop Disasters, copyright with the magazine it was published in, although one can wonder if one should be proud of that )

Image as found on the blog Photoshop Disasters, source magazine unknown

So here we are, us photographers. Trying our very, very best to produce a great image for our clients.
Sure, we all know that all images we see are edited to some extend. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with Dove’s viral from YouTube (by Tim Piper / Ogilvy), which is a quick peek behind the scenes of what’s really going on in the advertising world.
And also in the image shown above you can clearly see that for example the legs have been extended.
But the whole crew of designers and editors who let this image pass must’ve been either drunk or mass-hypnotized, because this is seriously one of the biggest bloopers I’ve seen in my graphic career. And I’ve seen a good number of them…