Composite Photos: Creativity or Cheating?

There are tons of beautiful images on the web that are composite. Meaning they are created using 2 or more photos combined together in Photoshop or other post processing software.

Sometimes it could be as simple as replacing the sky with something that is more exciting, or it could be a surreal picture made of several photos. Of course this would not be acceptable in photojournalism or science. But I think there is nothing wrong with being a bit creative sometimes, as long as you are transparent and mention in your description or comment that it is a composite image.

To me what is not acceptable is when some photographers, make a lot of changes to an image, being replacing the sky, making the mountains longer, adding lakes, etc. and not saying anything about it.

I rarely do composite simply because I am not very creative, but I really enjoy looking at work of some of amazing artists like Brook Shaden, or John Wilhelm.

I usually don’t plan on creating a composite in advance, but once I am behind the computer and processing the photo if I feel that it’s missing something or it’s too boring, then I think about what I can do with it and all my old photos kind of come to my mind and in my mind I create the photo. Then I try to create it in Photoshop.

Below are some of the examples of composite photos that I have created.

This is a pedestrian bridge close to where I live. I always wanted to take a photo of it because I thought it looks pretty cool and futuristic. But when I took the photo (on the left) it didn't look how I imagined it. Then I thought if I add Milkyway, it would be so cool. The middle image is the photo of Milkyway I took while staying in Orville, Washington one Summer. The final image is combination of two and I named it "Bridge to Galaxy".

Before I went t Iceland, I knew I wanted to dedicate some time to photograph the beautiful Icelandic horses. But while I was there, sky was mostly grey and boring and I never found horses against a beautiful background. When I got back, and looked at my photos of horses, none jumped out. But I liked this one as it shows how playful these horses were. I then added a background to make it look more exciting.

A mono color grey day in Spanish Bank in Vancouver. I added the red umbrella to add a splash of color.

What are your thoughts on composite photos? What's acceptable and what's not?

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