Poorly Photoshopped image wins Nikon photo competition, promptly turns into meme

Jan 29, 2016

Gannon Burgett

Gannon Burgett is a communications professional with over a decade of experience in content strategy, editing, marketing, multimedia content creation. He’s photographed and written content seen across hundreds of millions of pageviews. In addition to his communications work for various entities and publications, Gannon also runs his multimedia marketing agency, Ekleptik Media, where he brings his expertise as a full-stack creator to help develop and execute data-driven content strategies. His writing, photos, and videos have appeared in USA Today, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, Popular Mechanics, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Digital Trends, DPReview, PetaPixel, Imaging Resource, Lifewire, Yahoo News, Detroit Free Press, Lansing State Journal, and more.

Poorly Photoshopped image wins Nikon photo competition, promptly turns into meme

Jan 29, 2016

Gannon Burgett

Gannon Burgett is a communications professional with over a decade of experience in content strategy, editing, marketing, multimedia content creation. He’s photographed and written content seen across hundreds of millions of pageviews. In addition to his communications work for various entities and publications, Gannon also runs his multimedia marketing agency, Ekleptik Media, where he brings his expertise as a full-stack creator to help develop and execute data-driven content strategies. His writing, photos, and videos have appeared in USA Today, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, Popular Mechanics, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Digital Trends, DPReview, PetaPixel, Imaging Resource, Lifewire, Yahoo News, Detroit Free Press, Lansing State Journal, and more.

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Nikon Fake 2

Uh oh. Nikon Singapore PR might have some explaining to do.

Last night, Nikon Singapore shared a Facebook post announcing the winner of a photo contest giveaway. There was a slight problem though. The winning photo appears to be a fake, despite the story behind the image blatantly stating otherwise.

According to the post, which can be seen below, photographer Chay Yu Wei used his Nikon D90 to capture a photo of a plane perfectly composed within the confines of a ladder leading up the side of the building.

Nikon Fake 10

Chay Yu Wei himself even said he didn’t have to wait ‘too long’ for the plane, citing ‘luck’ as the factor in an Instagram comment.

Nikon Fake 1

The only problem is, upon opening the image to the full resolution posted on Facebook, the airplane is extremely pixelated around the edges. This immediately threw off eagle-eyed commenters who pointed out that this could very well be a composited image. After all, how likely is it that a plane was perfectly straight, centered and low enough to create a perfect silhouette?

We decided to take the image into Photoshop to check for ourselves and with only a little tweaking of the levels, it’s clear as day that it is a composited image. Not only is it composited, but Chay Yu Wei apparently didn’t even separate the white background of the airplane art he used. Below is a comparison of the image as shown and the image with the levels tweaked to highlight the square box around the plane.

Although the image itself was the center of attention, commenters also has some fun with it, posting their very own composited images, hoping for their chance to win a Nikon trolley bag. From an X-Wing to Godzilla, the image has since become a meme, becoming more glorious with each new iteration.

Below are some of our favorites from the comment section:

Nikon Fake 3

Nikon Fake 6

Nikon Fake 11

Nikon Fake 9

Nikon Fake 8

Nikon Fake 5

Nikon Fake 4

Nikon Fake 12

Nikon Fake 13

Nikon Fake 14

Nikon Fake 15

Update: Nikon Singapore has since responded on their Facebook page with a rather well thought-out and respectable response. They’ve also taken it upon themselves to take part in the meme-ification of the image, going so far as to poke fun at Canon. 

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[h/t Mezame]

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Gannon Burgett

Gannon Burgett

Gannon Burgett is a communications professional with over a decade of experience in content strategy, editing, marketing, multimedia content creation. He’s photographed and written content seen across hundreds of millions of pageviews. In addition to his communications work for various entities and publications, Gannon also runs his multimedia marketing agency, Ekleptik Media, where he brings his expertise as a full-stack creator to help develop and execute data-driven content strategies. His writing, photos, and videos have appeared in USA Today, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, Popular Mechanics, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Digital Trends, DPReview, PetaPixel, Imaging Resource, Lifewire, Yahoo News, Detroit Free Press, Lansing State Journal, and more.

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One response to “Poorly Photoshopped image wins Nikon photo competition, promptly turns into meme”

  1. SOOC – The Soby's

    […] manipulated when it was. The things that leap out to me are the case of a photographer who photoshopped a plane into his image for a contest and that moon shot that a photographer claims was not post […]