The local professional photography guild's monthly print contest this month requires images to be "composites." This means that the image does not represent reality. It is constructed in computer software, often combining elements from multiple other images. The idea is to make it look real, no matter how unreal it is. These sorts of images are everywhere around us. You see them daily in advertising. Oftentimes if an image looks too good to be real, then it is probably a composite.
For some photographers this presents an ethical dilemma. For others, it doesn’t. For example, I was in a photo club in Arizona where there was a nature photo contest, and a fellow photographer submitted an image of a hawk landing on a tree branch directly above him. It was a great image and filled the frame with spread wings and grasping talons. I later learned that the image was also not real. It was taken at the raptor show at the Desert Museum in Tucson. The hawk was actually a trained animal and was landing on its trainer’s arm. The photographer removed that arm in Photoshop and replaced it with a tree branch. He then removed the straps dangling from the hawk’s feet. The result was still a stunning image, but the problem for me is that he then presented it as reality and claimed he happened to be standing under that branch when the hawk suddenly came along and chose to land on it.
In another example, a photographer on a photography website I used to belong to (now defunct) presented an image he implied was taken in the wild underwater. It showed two dolphins rushing at him, filling the frame with their smiles. He had taken great pains to remove signs of where the image was actually taken. But he missed a corner of their tank at SeaWorld, and a bit of reflection from the glass he was shooting through. When I pointed out his mistake and his deception, he went ballistic, as people caught in lies often tend to do. It was a nice image and if he had not misrepresented it, I would have had no problem with it.
Anyway, I created a composite for the contest. I took a shot of hot air balloons from the balloon festival in Foley, Alabama, and placed them in the sky over Cades Cove, Tennessee. Unlike the examples above, though, when I posted the image to my Facebook page, I explained what I did.