Since rediscovering wood-turning and especially since I've started to delve more into design and shape-and-form etc, I've come to appreciate other art forms more honestly and pragmatically. I now follow a group on Facebook who upload photographs of North Wales, and there are one or two budding young photographers who have an amazing eye for composition and light. However (and it's a big 'however'), yesterday a bloke who's page shows that he posts some really good stuff, posted a picture of the silhouette of three birds in a formation that looked exactly like a smiley face, flying into a setting sun in a sky ablaze with reds - it was a stunner, but close inspection revealed that all was not as it seemed.
I enlarged the image to 500% and it was clear that one eye had been clipped out of an original image, and them overlaid onto the background image of the sky. If the bird and the background had been original, they would each have had the same size pixels, but these were quite different. Then I checked the other eye....it was a carbon copy of the first one, and again of a different pixel-count to the background. The bird representing the mouth was even more obviously a cut-and-paste job - you can even see the outline of the pixels in the image above.
Not being one to suffer fools, I challenged the authenticity of the picture, only to notice that others had started to do the same. Other viewers had even found identical and a similar picture from web-sites all over the world. Clearly, this 'photographer' had either copied an existing picture, or an idea. Equally clearly, his picture was a fake. However, the 'photographer' stepped in and insisted that he was genuine. I got a bit like a dog-with-a-ferret at this point, and posted some of the other similar and identical images, then the admin people stepped in, came down in the 'photographer's' favour and deleted all my messages, and those of any-body else who dared to question the photographer.
I shan't be subscribing to that group any more, but it made me think about my own work. Yes, I take influence from other woodturners, just as I do from numerous other sources, especially from nature and from history, but I'm sure I'd never stoop as low as this guy! Also, I think that our admin guys are a bit more honest and fairer than the 'North Wales Photographs' bunch.
Les
