When is it cheating?

I was out taking photos today on a bright, crisp winter's day and found a little flock of Goldfinches in a tree. I took three shots, shown together below.

Are you submitting for use in the newspaper? If not, it's not cheating.

Agreed. If it is photojournalism; it's cheating. Everything else is just art.

Well, I'm not sure, but when you end up with a pretty picture...what's the downside.

I agree as well. The only time it's cheating is if your selling the image to a news organization representing it as a real event. Otherwise anything goes.

It's only cheating if you're a photojournalist. In that case, it can get you fired -- and has in some noteworthy cases. Otherwise, it's art and you are the artist. Does it make sense to ask a painter if he or she saw the leaves in a scene exactly as depicted in the final work?

Use mine as an example...it is a real event, where is the line drawn?

The line is drawn if you told somebody that you took a picture of five egrets flying in formation. Otherwise, it's an artistic study in motion. That's my opinion.

I do have one question: how did you resist the urge to pan? Or didn't you?

Looks OK to me. I wish I could PP like that.

joedlh wrote in post #9321696
The line is drawn if you told somebody that you took a picture of five egrets flying in formation. Otherwise, it's an artistic study in motion. That's my opinion.

That's how I feel about that particular example. In my example, I felt that choosing the best of three poses for each bird independently wasn't too bad, but using both positions of the bird that moved was pushing it a bit, because I only saw 6 birds, but my photo shows 7.

I know the wildlife photo community gets quite excited about this sort of thing, especially the wild versus captivity debate. I was interested to know what people here think about my example, since it made me wonder when I did it.

Oaktree, thanks; it's only practice!

I was panning...at 1/2000, it's a photomerge, nothing fancy.

BTW, I like Mark's image.

Well we clone things out of our pictures all the time and that's not deemed cheating but it's the same idea. Is putting something in the shot worse than taking something out? Especially if it was there a moment beforehand?

For myself, I think as long as everything in the picture was photographed by me then it's ok!
(I would probably hesitate to rescale something or take a subject from a completely different geographical area or time frame because that would bother me.)

Quizzical_Squirrel wrote in post #9322195
For myself, I think as long as everything in the picture was photographed by me then it's ok!

Great point. Too many look to the web as a source of free photographs especially for assembled images. It's unethical to take someone else image and manipulate it.

gjl711 wrote in post #9321441
I agree as well. The only time it's cheating is if your selling the image to a news organization representing it as a real event. Otherwise anything goes.

Not really. There's also contest entries to consider. As long as you stipulate up front that the image you're submitting is a composite, you should be okay (depending on contest rules, obviously). To not divulge the info is considered unethical in most quarters. It all comes down to what kind of person you are and what sort of reputation you'd like to be known for. But for personal use, I'd agree that anything goes...

I agree with that, argyle. I once saw a shot in Practical Photography which at first made you go "wow!". It showed an owl coming straight towards the viewer with the sun behind it rising through the trees. The caption claimed the only PP was a little tidying up and contrast etc., but there was sunlight to the side of the owl which the sun as shown in the picture could not have been responsible for. I think the owl had been pasted on the background and that made me feel cheated because it was not as it was claimed. I would have felt quite differently if the composite had been declared.