The Cheaters

I was chatting with an artist near my booth about some of the other photographers there. He said one of the other nature photographers inserted animals into his pictures in Photoshop. I was quite startled by this and didn't quite believe him at first. The cardinal rule of digital photography is that you never, never, ever insert something into a picture that wasn't there to begin with. You can take out lens dust and maybe paint out an out of focus twig or something like that. But you never put anything in. So I took a stroll over to visit this photographer's booth to see what was going on. Sure enough, he had pictures of grizzlies fishing in a river and there was quite a large number of bears in the scene. And some of the bears looked like they didn't quite fit in the picture- he wasn't even that good at hiding it. He also had one of a group of seven or eight bald eagles all sitting on a log in front of lake. I've seen bald eagles in the wild and I've never seen more than one on the same branch, maybe two in the same tree at most. I've never seen any birds of prey ever congregate in one place. It was an awful lot of eagles on that one log. Maybe they were having a prayer meeting. Not to mention his skills as a digital print maker were terrible- the quality of his prints was quite low. And I imagine he used junk paper and all the rest of it. When I got back to my booth the artist that had originally tipped me off said this photographer had quite a following and was doing well with such pictures. I guess if people want to pay him money for that sort of thing it's their business.

This artist then told me about another photographer he knew- one that wasn't in that particular show. This photographer would photograph a tree or bush and then take other pictures he had of birds like cardinals and insert them into the picture. He would sell a certain arrangement of birds in the picture for one year and than the next year he'd change the number and positions of the birds in the picture and then sell it again. And people bought it like crazy. Well, I'll never go there. But if I ever meet this photographer in a show I'll shake his hand and congratulate him on his success. I'm sure he's laughing all the way to the bank.