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The Fake Snow Leopard: Photomontage Spread Around the World

153 points by onychomys 4y ago

CommitSyn 4y ago
I looked at a number of the pictures and I have no skin in this game but I'm not convinced. Many of the matches don't seem to actually be matches. One of the first for example - the lock of hair doesn't match any part of her hair and it's not crazy to think she may have brought some type of prop on a photo shoot.
- chefandy 4y ago
  This is the first I've encountered these pictures. I don't know anything about snow leopards but I've got tens of thousands of hours clocked in photoshop. Zooming way in on that supposed lock of hair could easily be a rumpled leather of a backpack or some other type of case. Even if it was altered, it could have been a distracting, unimportant element removed, like a colorful water bottle or something, without making it fake. The accusations are so forcefully presented that it seems like the author is trying to bluster their way through self doubt more than convince others.
  - codeduck 4y ago
    take a look at the later images that demonstrate geographic and topological features that do not match reality. The photos are all composites.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  The image of the photographer is the least compelling bit of evidence. But two different parts of a mountain range that can't appear in the same shot with that perspective is not convincing? Really?
  - steve_adams_86 4y ago
    Ever heard of tectonic plates? Those mountains are practically ripping around like they’re on a go-kart track, who knows where they’ll appear in photos.
- gilrain 4y ago
  How do you propose she moved those mountain ranges such that they could appear together like that? To a layman like myself, it seems impossible.
madaxe_again 4y ago
The ironing is delicious. Very, very little photography that you will ever see is untouched - from mild tweaking of curves to complete recomposition. This is what photoshop is for. Ansel Adams, for example, used to dodge and burn extensively when printing, and is viewed as a master of the art - he was mostly really good at upping the drama by amplifying or outright inventing chiaroscuro. Where does the line lie? Well, it depends on who your friends are.
- altacc 4y ago
  > Where does the line lie? Putting aside the discussion about these particular photographs... There are clear lines, especially for certain types of photography. For things like reportage, documentary and true nature photography, the simplest rule is to represent reality, without addition, removal or significant alteration. In these circles even significantly cropping a photo can be seen as manipulative. Dodging and burning is mostly seen as processing, not material change to the photograph. But importantly the rule is to not lie about the reality the photo depicts. Nature photography is as much about the effort or the hunt as it is the photo, so honest is key. Other photos have been removed from competitions and stripped of prizes due to misrepresentation, from editing to using tame animals. You can edit the photo's appearance through post processing of exposure, sharpness, etc... it is the subject that is important. Lying about the subject invalidates the photo.
  - aoeusnth1 4y ago
    In what way could cropping be manipulative? You could have taken the exact same framing with a different zoom setting on your lens.
    - altacc 4y ago
      Yes, both can have the same effect of selecting the editorial content of the photograph. With both methods (plus the selection of what photos from an event to publish) a photographer or their editor can choose what to convey. For example, if you have a photo of a group of people you can selectively crop, or frame in teh viewfinder, only the people that will convey an gripping editorial message, e.g remove or only include a certain demographic or action. If there are 1000 protesters standing around and 5 throwing stuff, the 5 will be photographed and reported as representative of the entire protest.
berkut 4y ago
As someone who deals (in the VFX industry) in CG rendering/lighting and compositing/rotopainting footage on a daily basis, I'm really not convinced by these arguments at all. Certainly the hair "lock" to me looks a lot more like a strap of a bag tied up or something than hair. Also packed snow shapes can change quite significantly in days if there's wind and or significant snowfall: obviously the mountain rock topology won't change, but in most of the cases in the article the lettered points (to me at least) appear to be packed snow mounds more than snow on rocks (although the backdrop one looks more rock-based). Edit: I would say however that I would agree "what is a snow leopard doing that high in the snowline?: there's unlikely to be prey there".
- nix23 4y ago
  The point for me was that a snow leopard never walks on such exposes snowy terrain, actually no animal does (humans with ropes are a exeption), it's simply too dangerous: >>As to whether snow leopards are likely to be seen on glaciers, Vincent Munier, a snow-leopard specialist, is categoric – the answer is no. But from her site: >I am simply a 24-year-old girl that has a 9-5 job, likes to take/edit photos, and tries to raise awareness of conservation and help our planet. Since I have received death threats for all of this, I have taken down my social accounts. It was maybe just to have a cool photo...but that is unacceptable behavior from the "social" community.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Wow, I get it that people get angry when composite and staged photos win photography competitions. But going as far as sending death threats to a hobbyist photographer whose photos were published by third parties, without proper permission and proper disclaimers it seems, is truly despicable. Because there is nothing wrong with composites (I don't do them, but art is in the eye of the beholder) as long as they are not passed on as non-composites. And just where the line between post-processing, editing and composites is, well, those lines are blurry, aren't they?
    - sho_hn 4y ago
xanthine 4y ago
One thing that bugs me is that this article doesn't link to any of the original sources, nor provides any links to the photographer's website. The photographer clearly states in her website that all of her photos are edited in some way or another (see 'Disclaimer'): https://kittiyapawlowski.com/about-kittiya https://kittiyapawlowski.com/about-kittiya Providing the originals would also make it trivial to pass it through https://fotoforensics.com/ https://fotoforensics.com/ to carry out a more robust detection of doctoring of the images.
- xanthine 4y ago
  So I took one of the images on the front page of her website (https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc05d17e6229c77b6557d4a/831378cf-4c7b-43c2-842e-6e72be7f0c81/web2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc05d17e6229c...) and uploaded it to FotoForensics: https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=282efc0801ef0a8a50689e59ff16ba76f63115f0.353647&show=ela https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=282efc0801ef0a8a50... The results are for you to judge.
  - berkut 4y ago
    Note: That analysis (ELA) only really looks at gradient/diff of compression artefacts in pratice, so if you losslessly edited the original from the RAW source at full float32 (say in Nuke or something which supports full precision workflows) and then exported to another file, that wouldn't show anything. In other words, it's mostly only good for detecting if a JPEG (with compression artefacts) was edited and saved to another JPEG, although even then you can work around it to some degree by saving at similar chroma and compression qualities if you know what you're doing.
- iamben 4y ago
  The article was last Friday. Any idea when she added the disclaimer? It looks like she never meant it to be presented as anything other than a composite, but someone took it as such and ran with it. Now she's trying to weather the "you're a terrible person" shitstorm.
  - 4y ago
tobr 4y ago
Brings to mind Terje Hellesø who became famous for his photos of his many close encounters with lynxes, over a decade ago. Of course they were all fake. https://photographersdirect.blogspot.com/2011/09/terje-helless-fraudulent-photos.html?m=1 https://photographersdirect.blogspot.com/2011/09/terje-helle...
Aeolun 4y ago
Excerpt from the authors’ website for visibility: > News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world. They told their followers that they were not edited. This is untrue, I always edit my images. > In September-October, I traveled to Nepal, took photos, edited them, and posted them on my Facebook Page to my 2000 friends and 1100 followers. The story behind this series is true, all of the images are taken by me. I did in fact walk 103 miles to take those images. I gave permission to a select few places to share them. My intent for the entire series was to raise awareness of snow leopard conservation. I sold a little over 50 prints and donated $787.50 to the Snow Leopard Trust.
- nix23 4y ago
  >>Snow Leopard Trust BTW you can do that too by drinking one of the best Vodka's i ever had: https://www.vodkahaus.de/snow-leopard-wodka- https://www.vodkahaus.de/snow-leopard-wodka-
  - adwn 4y ago
    > one of the best Vodka's i ever had So you've never had a better mixture of 60% H2O and 40% ethanol? Because that's what's left after 4x distillation followed by filtration, as claimed in the description. I'm always baffled by people swooning over "good vodka". You're drinking industrial alcohol, diluted with distilled water! There's no flavor left.
    - nix23 4y ago
      >I'm always baffled by people swooning over "good vodka". You're drinking industrial alcohol, diluted with distilled water! There's no flavor left. Maybe you just have bad taste buds, i am baffled by people who don't taste the difference, an it's probably because you drink vodka that is made with distilled water.
      - iso1631 4y ago
wheelerof4te 4y ago
Serbia has her own black panther for a while now. Just Google "Serbia Black Panther sightings".
bawolff 4y ago
This whole thing seems rediculous. What next, someone going to accuse an abstract painter of not faithfuly representing reality?
- nix23 4y ago
  Well if you write that next to your faked photo: >>Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for. https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series Not faking something is as important for a Nature-Photographer as it is for a Journalist, otherwise you loose any credibility.
samwillis 4y ago
I dislike this style of journalism, they are creating a narrative that proposes a malicious intent to deceive by the photographer and artist, but provide zero evidence that that is the case. They bombard you with evidence of "something" and imply it means something else. Here they are providing (compelling) evidence the photos are manipulated, but using that to imply that that manipulation was done to deceive. There is no evidence of that. So she didn't explicitly say they were manipulated photos (initially), but she also didn't say they weren't. The people at fault in this whole saga are the publications that published the photos without permission or checking their veracity and the author of this article who is suggesting malicious intent without evidence. This article, while well researched and presented, just feels like gatekeeping by someone with a personal grudge. As a society we really need to step back from the need to attack first.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
  On https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series there is no mention whatsoever that images are fake collages. Images are highly misleading, no actual snow leopards are in places like this. Description heavily suggests that this are real photos. (at least right now, site is being edited, they just added disclaimer and made their FB page private) And this is case of being deliberately misleading. Note that they not claimed that it was malicious!
  - xbar 4y ago
    The artist does not produce photographs.
    - matkoniecz 4y ago
      That is exactly the problem discussed in this HN submission.
- stavros 4y ago
  Agreed, is this at a competition or something? The article makes it sound like the photographer won a prize with doctored photos, but if it's just someone posting a composite and everyone going crazy with "omg that's not a photo", that's very very different.
smohnot 4y ago
she now admits on her website that some images are composites: "To clarify, all my images are edited and processed in Photoshop and Lightroom. Some images are composites, some are not."
bhouston 4y ago
She filed a DMCA claim to get this url removed from google, which is abuse of the DMCA process for sure: DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Google SENDER Kittiya [Private] US Sent on November 25, 2022 COUNTRY: US RECIPIENT Google LLC [Private] Mountain View, CA, 94043, US SUBMITTER Google LLC Re: Unknown NOTICE TYPE: DMCA Copyright claim 1 KIND OF WORK: Unspecified DESCRIPTION The photographs of the mountains and snow leopards which can be viewed on my website at the URL below. ORIGINAL URLS: https://kittiyapawlowski.com/prints https://kittiyapawlowski.com/prints ALLEGEDLY INFRINGING URLS: https://alpinemag.com/fake-snow-leopard-photomontage-spread-around-world-kittiya-pawlowski/ https://alpinemag.com/fake-snow-leopard-photomontage-spread-... Edit: the reasons it is abuse is because this is fair use. https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/limitations-on-a-copyright-owners-rights/fair-use-exceptions-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... Fair use exception allows for use of copyrighted material for the purpose of criticism. No other anrticles are complained about by this “photographer” that use these images only the single article that accuses her of fraud.
- stavros 4y ago
  Why is it an abuse? Wasn't the process built exactly for getting copyrighted material off of sites?
  - richrichardsson 4y ago
    Because it's "fair use"?
  - alias_neo 4y ago
    My guess would be that fair use makes this an abuse? They're using the images only as much as is required to debunk them being photos they're believed to be. If you can't refer to something you're trying to discuss our debunk it makes it difficult to do so, does it not? I'd call their use here "evidence" or something along those lines. If they were presenting the images as their own or for artistic viewing purposes, I could see her argument, but they're not, they're trying to start a conversation about how they're not what they appear or claim to be.
somishere 4y ago
Bright eyed 24yo dev: Hey look at this amazing thing I made. Only 100 dependencies. Donate money to my patreon. World: That's slick, good on you for putting yourself out there. Bright eyed 24yo non-dev: Hey look at this amazing thing I made. Buy a print and think about conservation and I will donate money to a charity. World: Wow. Hang on, not wow! NOT. WOW! Our original wow was based on our own distorted / ignorant reality, now corrected by internet / Truth™. OMG you f#$!ing tried to trick us. At least we're pretty sure you did. Destroy. Edit: She's 24. She doesn't need to be taught a lesson by you or the internet.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  Remind me what age Elizabeth Holmes was when Theranos had been at its peak.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    Wow, the comparison makes you look like an asshole. There is nothing analogous between the two situations.
    - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      The comparison is there to point out the age has jack shit to do with this.
      - shkkmo 4y ago
        It doesn't do that because those are two radically different cases.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  People generally dislike it when they are deceived. If you don't want to blame her, blame the journalists who reprinted her artwork, as if it were a real photograph.
- matkoniecz 4y ago
exitb 4y ago
It's interesting to note that must nature documentaries are essentially composites too. It's a common practice to create scenes using footage from different times and locations, staged, with altered sound etc. All presented with a narrative that does not match what we're actually seeing on the screen.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Yeah, like when they tell a story of a lioness, for example, but, occasionally, you can tell the lioness in the shot is not the same one, or the shot was taken before the one that preceded it. I don't know what to think. I don't have a stake in this, but it is quite common for documentaries to take some real liberties with the information they present.
matthewmacleod 4y ago
This article looks like the rant of someone completely unhinged. It's absolutely fucking wild to me that somebody would invest this amount of effort into investigating the authenticity of some random images ripped from Instagram or a blog. I'd understand probing someone who had cheated to win a competition—a straight-up wrong act in my view—but I had no idea this particular hobby was filled with people who were quite so sensitive to the authenticity of photographs.
- qnpnp 4y ago
  It seems pretty normal that people react to deception, even if it occurs outside the setting of a formal competition.
  - shkkmo 4y ago
    What was the deception? I don't see anyone posting any evidence of claims that the photos are undoctored or manipulated and the artist in question makes a career of doing exactly that. The only deception here is self deception from "journalists" who stole a published her image without bother to do any actual legwork.
  - matthewmacleod 4y ago
    I think a normal journalistic reaction to "deception"—a clever word choice on your part—might be to say: These photos from a random source which got spread widely look like they might be doctored, so we asked the photographer and they admitted/denied they were fabricated, this is why we agree/disagree and why genuine photography matters Instead we get this ratcheting-up of drama, and I can't help but think encouraging a pile-on of death threats is really a healthy approach.
    - qnpnp 4y ago
      This is not a random source, and most importantly it is not a source without context. If she had just posted these pics on her instagram with no comments I would be much more willing to say she never claimed anything and people just jumped on it. I probably wouldn't need to, however, because this whole thing wouldn't have happened in that case. What she did is posting these pics on her website together with a whole story and presentation, with plenty of details and explanations, which makes her appear as a nature photographer on a difficult trip to spot a rare animal and who magically manages to find what she's looking for with a perfect setting, allowing her to snap incredible photography. Obviously such impressive photos will then circulate everywhere (and many people will ask to buy it). Note that, despite the extensive description of her work for these pictures (i) there is not a single mention they are fake (prior to the disclaimer which was added later), (ii) the website is dedicated to those pictures and does not refer to her previous work on digital image (iii) before the deception was exposed she seemed very happy to be featured on newspaper since she included the article of the London Times. My view is that this is genuine deceit, not just a person who published pictures without giving it much thoughts and simply found out afterwards that people misinterpreted it.
bitL 4y ago
The photographer was just stable diffusing "snow lion on the mountain edge around Everest" manually...
- suzzer99 4y ago
  That or spot healing brush has become really advanced.
wruza 4y ago
First we create a culture of attention seeking and cute fake presentations, then we pick one random career/hobby at the start and ruin it, because we need attention too, then we discuss how screwed up it is under a microscope. Nature in its glory, a metapicture worth framing.
2-718-281-828 4y ago
someone got a link to the photos in question?
honeybadger1 4y ago
Some irony here on HN... 'She never claimed to be a journalist, who expects it to be real or not fake, it's art!' A few days later..... 'Elon is allowing people to say what they want, this spreads misinformation or perhaps fake news by people!' But they aren't journalists? Is it okay? Is it art(lol)? Heh..People making excuses for the things they personally like, or don't like. Anyway, she is well within her right to make whatever she wants to spread it around dishonestly, but that has consequences depending on how she did it. Looks like she started the wrong way and she got called on it, so she is now reaping the consequences of it.
- valeness 4y ago
  > Hobbyist sending art to like a thousand people > Billionaire "Techno-King Genius" owning a platform and tweeting transphobic and racist conspiracies to hundreds of millions of people "These are the same thing" ~ You You can both be ok with narrative art and be against widespread misinformation campaigns that lead to tangible deaths and hate crimes. These are not conflicting viewpoints.
  - honeybadger1 4y ago
    Yes, because Twitter boils all down to trans people having a safe place. Only a man could put on a dress then claim to be the most marginalized member of society. Hello extremes!
k3vinw 4y ago
And the images in question are still being falsely advertised on their website with the exhilarating narrative. It's a pretty good scam in the digital world of art as long as it lasts.
havnagiggle 4y ago
It's been probably 15 years since I took a class on image processing, but I recall that it was very obvious looking at a 2D FFT and other frequency analysis tools if an image had been modified, because you'd end up with a lot of discontinuities. Maybe that is not as telling these days because every image is going through multiple rounds of processing. However I personally find it difficult to follow the "look at the shadows!" type of analysis, and all I can think is there's probably a better way to present this with less ambiguity. Maybe the writer is just using the tools they know and doesn't have the background or tools they need.
- max51 4y ago
  Those technique don't work very well when the edits are done on the RAW files directly. I creates a lot of false positive and negatives. When a picture is shared by the original photographer directly, it's extremely hard to differentiate between fake and real. Just to name a few reasons for it that come to mind: -The original resolution is wayyy bigger than what you see online. When you go from 300Mpx (eg. a panorama) down to 2 - 10 mpx and add compression, it will hide most of the artefacts. -better lenses means they have less distortion and sharpness problem at the edge of the frame. Makes it easier to blend different pictures together seamlessly -raw files editing allows a lot more modification to the colors without degradation or leaving traces. You are effectively changing the choices that the camera makes when it creates the colors. There is no difference between changing the color temperature in the camera and in photoshop if you use RAW. With jpg editing done by a third party... yeah, those are easy to spot with the right tools
helloworld11 4y ago
Packed snow shapes can be ambiguous, but entire mountain peaks don't randomly move to different places as is clearly the case in these photos. The article presents and excellent and very detailed case for how the photos are doctored all over the place. It's obvious and easy to see once pointed out. I can't at all imagine how it's so hard to believe. This combined with a bunch of other odd details makes her case very suspicious. Given how much her original narrative implied fairly pure nature photography and NOT artistic composite creations, what this photographer did was dishonest in a very straightforward sense. The dishonesty becomes all the more obvious when you realize that until she was called out by a detailed analysis, she freely let sites for such entities as Saatchi Art, the U.S Embassy in Nepal, Animal Planet and the Times of London, share, claim and think that her photos were essentially nature shots with modest editing and no more. Not a peep, and she even made sales. It was only after this individual was called out by a very specific media analysis that suddenly "News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world." And then up go the DMCA claims against the same sites that had previously shared her photos approvingly withuot being asked to take them down then (especially petapixel) She seemed to have no problem with any of that as long as her original blog post and all it strongly implied were believed.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This reminds me of when National Geographic had (on the cover?) an impossible picture of the pyramids - it wasn’t something you could actually take. https://thecurrent.educatorinnovator.org/resource/when-images-lie-traveling-to-the-pyramids-with-national-geographic-and-thinking-about-photo-illustrations-with-martha-stewart https://thecurrent.educatorinnovator.org/resource/when-image...
- mc32 4y ago
  I don't completely agree. If what she presented was a "narrative" for a specific audience, I think that's fine. Sort of like literary fiction vs non-fiction story writing. We have historical fiction where we mix past and present real and fake. I don't see why a conceptual artists can't do the same with their photography/art --unless they were completely deceiving their audience for manipulation or monetary gain, i.e. fraud. On the other hand it seems people are using her images without permission and passing them as authentic—which if we’re talking about transgressions, would be worse.
aaron695 4y ago
matkoniecz 4y ago
For me the worst part of that is progressing destruction of trust. People keep running into things like that all the time, for me previous case was being assigned a completely fake quote in some local news website (luckily, they had neither my name nor photo). If someone is unsure why some people claim that global warming is fake, smog is not harmful and so on - that is because we have far too many lies and people willing to defend clear liars. As result many people flail looking for trustworthy data source. And typically end with even worse, but for many distinction was not clear.
- glonq 4y ago
  TBH nothing pushes me towards misanthropy more than the sad realization that virtually everything nowadays is either heavily exaggerated or just outright fake/lies. And it's not even the actual dishonesty that bugs me, it's the fact that we have been conditioned to accept this as okay.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Non-story? Photography is by default understood to be creative work, the very first thing people do is replace entire sky with computer generated imagery if it doesn't look interesting enough. There are certainly situations where authentic reproduction is important - law, journalism, documentary, medicine. And if she used someone else's photos without credit/permission, that's a problem. But that family portrait or pack of wolves shot over your mantelpiece? Edited! If you really want to look at your pimples or nearby hiker's behind every day, negotiate that with the photographer. But most people want art, not a police mugshot in these situations. I am not saying there is nothing there, just that malice is not proven and someone has wasted a lot of time refuting what has not been explicitly claimed. I would buy a print if I like, the price was right and especially if money went to a good cause. If anything, I would want the close up one to be brightened/de-hazed for my living room, even though nature doesn't always look like that.

153 points by onychomys 4y ago

I looked at a number of the pictures and I have no skin in this game but I'm not convinced. Many of the matches don't seem to actually be matches. One of the first for example - the lock of hair doesn't match any part of her hair and it's not crazy to think she may have brought some type of prop on a photo shoot.

chefandy 4y ago
This is the first I've encountered these pictures. I don't know anything about snow leopards but I've got tens of thousands of hours clocked in photoshop. Zooming way in on that supposed lock of hair could easily be a rumpled leather of a backpack or some other type of case. Even if it was altered, it could have been a distracting, unimportant element removed, like a colorful water bottle or something, without making it fake. The accusations are so forcefully presented that it seems like the author is trying to bluster their way through self doubt more than convince others.
- codeduck 4y ago
  take a look at the later images that demonstrate geographic and topological features that do not match reality. The photos are all composites.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
The image of the photographer is the least compelling bit of evidence. But two different parts of a mountain range that can't appear in the same shot with that perspective is not convincing? Really?
- steve_adams_86 4y ago
  Ever heard of tectonic plates? Those mountains are practically ripping around like they’re on a go-kart track, who knows where they’ll appear in photos.
gilrain 4y ago
How do you propose she moved those mountain ranges such that they could appear together like that? To a layman like myself, it seems impossible.

madaxe_again 4y ago

The ironing is delicious. Very, very little photography that you will ever see is untouched - from mild tweaking of curves to complete recomposition. This is what photoshop is for. Ansel Adams, for example, used to dodge and burn extensively when printing, and is viewed as a master of the art - he was mostly really good at upping the drama by amplifying or outright inventing chiaroscuro. Where does the line lie? Well, it depends on who your friends are.

altacc 4y ago
> Where does the line lie? Putting aside the discussion about these particular photographs... There are clear lines, especially for certain types of photography. For things like reportage, documentary and true nature photography, the simplest rule is to represent reality, without addition, removal or significant alteration. In these circles even significantly cropping a photo can be seen as manipulative. Dodging and burning is mostly seen as processing, not material change to the photograph. But importantly the rule is to not lie about the reality the photo depicts. Nature photography is as much about the effort or the hunt as it is the photo, so honest is key. Other photos have been removed from competitions and stripped of prizes due to misrepresentation, from editing to using tame animals. You can edit the photo's appearance through post processing of exposure, sharpness, etc... it is the subject that is important. Lying about the subject invalidates the photo.
- aoeusnth1 4y ago
  In what way could cropping be manipulative? You could have taken the exact same framing with a different zoom setting on your lens.
  - altacc 4y ago
    Yes, both can have the same effect of selecting the editorial content of the photograph. With both methods (plus the selection of what photos from an event to publish) a photographer or their editor can choose what to convey. For example, if you have a photo of a group of people you can selectively crop, or frame in teh viewfinder, only the people that will convey an gripping editorial message, e.g remove or only include a certain demographic or action. If there are 1000 protesters standing around and 5 throwing stuff, the 5 will be photographed and reported as representative of the entire protest.

berkut 4y ago

As someone who deals (in the VFX industry) in CG rendering/lighting and compositing/rotopainting footage on a daily basis, I'm really not convinced by these arguments at all. Certainly the hair "lock" to me looks a lot more like a strap of a bag tied up or something than hair. Also packed snow shapes can change quite significantly in days if there's wind and or significant snowfall: obviously the mountain rock topology won't change, but in most of the cases in the article the lettered points (to me at least) appear to be packed snow mounds more than snow on rocks (although the backdrop one looks more rock-based). Edit: I would say however that I would agree "what is a snow leopard doing that high in the snowline?: there's unlikely to be prey there".

nix23 4y ago
The point for me was that a snow leopard never walks on such exposes snowy terrain, actually no animal does (humans with ropes are a exeption), it's simply too dangerous: >>As to whether snow leopards are likely to be seen on glaciers, Vincent Munier, a snow-leopard specialist, is categoric – the answer is no. But from her site: >I am simply a 24-year-old girl that has a 9-5 job, likes to take/edit photos, and tries to raise awareness of conservation and help our planet. Since I have received death threats for all of this, I have taken down my social accounts. It was maybe just to have a cool photo...but that is unacceptable behavior from the "social" community.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Wow, I get it that people get angry when composite and staged photos win photography competitions. But going as far as sending death threats to a hobbyist photographer whose photos were published by third parties, without proper permission and proper disclaimers it seems, is truly despicable. Because there is nothing wrong with composites (I don't do them, but art is in the eye of the beholder) as long as they are not passed on as non-composites. And just where the line between post-processing, editing and composites is, well, those lines are blurry, aren't they?
  - sho_hn 4y ago

xanthine 4y ago

One thing that bugs me is that this article doesn't link to any of the original sources, nor provides any links to the photographer's website. The photographer clearly states in her website that all of her photos are edited in some way or another (see 'Disclaimer'): https://kittiyapawlowski.com/about-kittiya https://kittiyapawlowski.com/about-kittiya Providing the originals would also make it trivial to pass it through https://fotoforensics.com/ https://fotoforensics.com/ to carry out a more robust detection of doctoring of the images.

xanthine 4y ago
So I took one of the images on the front page of her website (https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc05d17e6229c77b6557d4a/831378cf-4c7b-43c2-842e-6e72be7f0c81/web2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5dc05d17e6229c...) and uploaded it to FotoForensics: https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=282efc0801ef0a8a50689e59ff16ba76f63115f0.353647&show=ela https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=282efc0801ef0a8a50... The results are for you to judge.
- berkut 4y ago
  Note: That analysis (ELA) only really looks at gradient/diff of compression artefacts in pratice, so if you losslessly edited the original from the RAW source at full float32 (say in Nuke or something which supports full precision workflows) and then exported to another file, that wouldn't show anything. In other words, it's mostly only good for detecting if a JPEG (with compression artefacts) was edited and saved to another JPEG, although even then you can work around it to some degree by saving at similar chroma and compression qualities if you know what you're doing.
iamben 4y ago
The article was last Friday. Any idea when she added the disclaimer? It looks like she never meant it to be presented as anything other than a composite, but someone took it as such and ran with it. Now she's trying to weather the "you're a terrible person" shitstorm.
- 4y ago

tobr 4y ago

Brings to mind Terje Hellesø who became famous for his photos of his many close encounters with lynxes, over a decade ago. Of course they were all fake. https://photographersdirect.blogspot.com/2011/09/terje-helless-fraudulent-photos.html?m=1 https://photographersdirect.blogspot.com/2011/09/terje-helle...

Aeolun 4y ago

Excerpt from the authors’ website for visibility: > News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world. They told their followers that they were not edited. This is untrue, I always edit my images. > In September-October, I traveled to Nepal, took photos, edited them, and posted them on my Facebook Page to my 2000 friends and 1100 followers. The story behind this series is true, all of the images are taken by me. I did in fact walk 103 miles to take those images. I gave permission to a select few places to share them. My intent for the entire series was to raise awareness of snow leopard conservation. I sold a little over 50 prints and donated $787.50 to the Snow Leopard Trust.

nix23 4y ago
>>Snow Leopard Trust BTW you can do that too by drinking one of the best Vodka's i ever had: https://www.vodkahaus.de/snow-leopard-wodka- https://www.vodkahaus.de/snow-leopard-wodka-
- adwn 4y ago
  > one of the best Vodka's i ever had So you've never had a better mixture of 60% H2O and 40% ethanol? Because that's what's left after 4x distillation followed by filtration, as claimed in the description. I'm always baffled by people swooning over "good vodka". You're drinking industrial alcohol, diluted with distilled water! There's no flavor left.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >I'm always baffled by people swooning over "good vodka". You're drinking industrial alcohol, diluted with distilled water! There's no flavor left. Maybe you just have bad taste buds, i am baffled by people who don't taste the difference, an it's probably because you drink vodka that is made with distilled water.
    - iso1631 4y ago

wheelerof4te 4y ago

Serbia has her own black panther for a while now. Just Google "Serbia Black Panther sightings".

bawolff 4y ago

This whole thing seems rediculous. What next, someone going to accuse an abstract painter of not faithfuly representing reality?

nix23 4y ago
Well if you write that next to your faked photo: >>Squinting through my camera’s telephoto lens, I noticed something in the shadow of Mount Pumori. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was exactly what I was looking for. https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series Not faking something is as important for a Nature-Photographer as it is for a Journalist, otherwise you loose any credibility.

samwillis 4y ago

I dislike this style of journalism, they are creating a narrative that proposes a malicious intent to deceive by the photographer and artist, but provide zero evidence that that is the case. They bombard you with evidence of "something" and imply it means something else. Here they are providing (compelling) evidence the photos are manipulated, but using that to imply that that manipulation was done to deceive. There is no evidence of that. So she didn't explicitly say they were manipulated photos (initially), but she also didn't say they weren't. The people at fault in this whole saga are the publications that published the photos without permission or checking their veracity and the author of this article who is suggesting malicious intent without evidence. This article, while well researched and presented, just feels like gatekeeping by someone with a personal grudge. As a society we really need to step back from the need to attack first.

matkoniecz 4y ago
On https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series https://kittiyapawlowski.com/snow-leopard-series there is no mention whatsoever that images are fake collages. Images are highly misleading, no actual snow leopards are in places like this. Description heavily suggests that this are real photos. (at least right now, site is being edited, they just added disclaimer and made their FB page private) And this is case of being deliberately misleading. Note that they not claimed that it was malicious!
- xbar 4y ago
  The artist does not produce photographs.
  - matkoniecz 4y ago
    That is exactly the problem discussed in this HN submission.
stavros 4y ago
Agreed, is this at a competition or something? The article makes it sound like the photographer won a prize with doctored photos, but if it's just someone posting a composite and everyone going crazy with "omg that's not a photo", that's very very different.

smohnot 4y ago

she now admits on her website that some images are composites: "To clarify, all my images are edited and processed in Photoshop and Lightroom. Some images are composites, some are not."

bhouston 4y ago

She filed a DMCA claim to get this url removed from google, which is abuse of the DMCA process for sure: DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Google SENDER Kittiya [Private] US Sent on November 25, 2022 COUNTRY: US RECIPIENT Google LLC [Private] Mountain View, CA, 94043, US SUBMITTER Google LLC Re: Unknown NOTICE TYPE: DMCA Copyright claim 1 KIND OF WORK: Unspecified DESCRIPTION The photographs of the mountains and snow leopards which can be viewed on my website at the URL below. ORIGINAL URLS: https://kittiyapawlowski.com/prints https://kittiyapawlowski.com/prints ALLEGEDLY INFRINGING URLS: https://alpinemag.com/fake-snow-leopard-photomontage-spread-around-world-kittiya-pawlowski/ https://alpinemag.com/fake-snow-leopard-photomontage-spread-... Edit: the reasons it is abuse is because this is fair use. https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/limitations-on-a-copyright-owners-rights/fair-use-exceptions-copyright/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... Fair use exception allows for use of copyrighted material for the purpose of criticism. No other anrticles are complained about by this “photographer” that use these images only the single article that accuses her of fraud.

stavros 4y ago
Why is it an abuse? Wasn't the process built exactly for getting copyrighted material off of sites?
- richrichardsson 4y ago
  Because it's "fair use"?
- alias_neo 4y ago
  My guess would be that fair use makes this an abuse? They're using the images only as much as is required to debunk them being photos they're believed to be. If you can't refer to something you're trying to discuss our debunk it makes it difficult to do so, does it not? I'd call their use here "evidence" or something along those lines. If they were presenting the images as their own or for artistic viewing purposes, I could see her argument, but they're not, they're trying to start a conversation about how they're not what they appear or claim to be.

somishere 4y ago

Bright eyed 24yo dev: Hey look at this amazing thing I made. Only 100 dependencies. Donate money to my patreon. World: That's slick, good on you for putting yourself out there. Bright eyed 24yo non-dev: Hey look at this amazing thing I made. Buy a print and think about conservation and I will donate money to a charity. World: Wow. Hang on, not wow! NOT. WOW! Our original wow was based on our own distorted / ignorant reality, now corrected by internet / Truth™. OMG you f#$!ing tried to trick us. At least we're pretty sure you did. Destroy. Edit: She's 24. She doesn't need to be taught a lesson by you or the internet.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
Remind me what age Elizabeth Holmes was when Theranos had been at its peak.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  Wow, the comparison makes you look like an asshole. There is nothing analogous between the two situations.
  - WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
    The comparison is there to point out the age has jack shit to do with this.
    - shkkmo 4y ago
      It doesn't do that because those are two radically different cases.
constantcrying 4y ago
People generally dislike it when they are deceived. If you don't want to blame her, blame the journalists who reprinted her artwork, as if it were a real photograph.
matkoniecz 4y ago

exitb 4y ago

It's interesting to note that must nature documentaries are essentially composites too. It's a common practice to create scenes using footage from different times and locations, staged, with altered sound etc. All presented with a narrative that does not match what we're actually seeing on the screen.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
Yeah, like when they tell a story of a lioness, for example, but, occasionally, you can tell the lioness in the shot is not the same one, or the shot was taken before the one that preceded it. I don't know what to think. I don't have a stake in this, but it is quite common for documentaries to take some real liberties with the information they present.

matthewmacleod 4y ago

This article looks like the rant of someone completely unhinged. It's absolutely fucking wild to me that somebody would invest this amount of effort into investigating the authenticity of some random images ripped from Instagram or a blog. I'd understand probing someone who had cheated to win a competition—a straight-up wrong act in my view—but I had no idea this particular hobby was filled with people who were quite so sensitive to the authenticity of photographs.

qnpnp 4y ago
It seems pretty normal that people react to deception, even if it occurs outside the setting of a formal competition.
- shkkmo 4y ago
  What was the deception? I don't see anyone posting any evidence of claims that the photos are undoctored or manipulated and the artist in question makes a career of doing exactly that. The only deception here is self deception from "journalists" who stole a published her image without bother to do any actual legwork.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  I think a normal journalistic reaction to "deception"—a clever word choice on your part—might be to say: These photos from a random source which got spread widely look like they might be doctored, so we asked the photographer and they admitted/denied they were fabricated, this is why we agree/disagree and why genuine photography matters Instead we get this ratcheting-up of drama, and I can't help but think encouraging a pile-on of death threats is really a healthy approach.
  - qnpnp 4y ago
    This is not a random source, and most importantly it is not a source without context. If she had just posted these pics on her instagram with no comments I would be much more willing to say she never claimed anything and people just jumped on it. I probably wouldn't need to, however, because this whole thing wouldn't have happened in that case. What she did is posting these pics on her website together with a whole story and presentation, with plenty of details and explanations, which makes her appear as a nature photographer on a difficult trip to spot a rare animal and who magically manages to find what she's looking for with a perfect setting, allowing her to snap incredible photography. Obviously such impressive photos will then circulate everywhere (and many people will ask to buy it). Note that, despite the extensive description of her work for these pictures (i) there is not a single mention they are fake (prior to the disclaimer which was added later), (ii) the website is dedicated to those pictures and does not refer to her previous work on digital image (iii) before the deception was exposed she seemed very happy to be featured on newspaper since she included the article of the London Times. My view is that this is genuine deceit, not just a person who published pictures without giving it much thoughts and simply found out afterwards that people misinterpreted it.

bitL 4y ago

The photographer was just stable diffusing "snow lion on the mountain edge around Everest" manually...

suzzer99 4y ago
That or spot healing brush has become really advanced.

wruza 4y ago

First we create a culture of attention seeking and cute fake presentations, then we pick one random career/hobby at the start and ruin it, because we need attention too, then we discuss how screwed up it is under a microscope. Nature in its glory, a metapicture worth framing.

2-718-281-828 4y ago

someone got a link to the photos in question?

honeybadger1 4y ago

Some irony here on HN... 'She never claimed to be a journalist, who expects it to be real or not fake, it's art!' A few days later..... 'Elon is allowing people to say what they want, this spreads misinformation or perhaps fake news by people!' But they aren't journalists? Is it okay? Is it art(lol)? Heh..People making excuses for the things they personally like, or don't like. Anyway, she is well within her right to make whatever she wants to spread it around dishonestly, but that has consequences depending on how she did it. Looks like she started the wrong way and she got called on it, so she is now reaping the consequences of it.

valeness 4y ago
> Hobbyist sending art to like a thousand people > Billionaire "Techno-King Genius" owning a platform and tweeting transphobic and racist conspiracies to hundreds of millions of people "These are the same thing" ~ You You can both be ok with narrative art and be against widespread misinformation campaigns that lead to tangible deaths and hate crimes. These are not conflicting viewpoints.
- honeybadger1 4y ago
  Yes, because Twitter boils all down to trans people having a safe place. Only a man could put on a dress then claim to be the most marginalized member of society. Hello extremes!

k3vinw 4y ago

And the images in question are still being falsely advertised on their website with the exhilarating narrative. It's a pretty good scam in the digital world of art as long as it lasts.

havnagiggle 4y ago

It's been probably 15 years since I took a class on image processing, but I recall that it was very obvious looking at a 2D FFT and other frequency analysis tools if an image had been modified, because you'd end up with a lot of discontinuities. Maybe that is not as telling these days because every image is going through multiple rounds of processing. However I personally find it difficult to follow the "look at the shadows!" type of analysis, and all I can think is there's probably a better way to present this with less ambiguity. Maybe the writer is just using the tools they know and doesn't have the background or tools they need.

max51 4y ago
Those technique don't work very well when the edits are done on the RAW files directly. I creates a lot of false positive and negatives. When a picture is shared by the original photographer directly, it's extremely hard to differentiate between fake and real. Just to name a few reasons for it that come to mind: -The original resolution is wayyy bigger than what you see online. When you go from 300Mpx (eg. a panorama) down to 2 - 10 mpx and add compression, it will hide most of the artefacts. -better lenses means they have less distortion and sharpness problem at the edge of the frame. Makes it easier to blend different pictures together seamlessly -raw files editing allows a lot more modification to the colors without degradation or leaving traces. You are effectively changing the choices that the camera makes when it creates the colors. There is no difference between changing the color temperature in the camera and in photoshop if you use RAW. With jpg editing done by a third party... yeah, those are easy to spot with the right tools

helloworld11 4y ago

Packed snow shapes can be ambiguous, but entire mountain peaks don't randomly move to different places as is clearly the case in these photos. The article presents and excellent and very detailed case for how the photos are doctored all over the place. It's obvious and easy to see once pointed out. I can't at all imagine how it's so hard to believe. This combined with a bunch of other odd details makes her case very suspicious. Given how much her original narrative implied fairly pure nature photography and NOT artistic composite creations, what this photographer did was dishonest in a very straightforward sense. The dishonesty becomes all the more obvious when you realize that until she was called out by a detailed analysis, she freely let sites for such entities as Saatchi Art, the U.S Embassy in Nepal, Animal Planet and the Times of London, share, claim and think that her photos were essentially nature shots with modest editing and no more. Not a peep, and she even made sales. It was only after this individual was called out by a very specific media analysis that suddenly "News and media from around the world stole my images and published them with their own meaning. They did not ask me if they were edited. They interpreted them in their own way and spread them around the world." And then up go the DMCA claims against the same sites that had previously shared her photos approvingly withuot being asked to take them down then (especially petapixel) She seemed to have no problem with any of that as long as her original blog post and all it strongly implied were believed.

bombcar 4y ago
This reminds me of when National Geographic had (on the cover?) an impossible picture of the pyramids - it wasn’t something you could actually take. https://thecurrent.educatorinnovator.org/resource/when-images-lie-traveling-to-the-pyramids-with-national-geographic-and-thinking-about-photo-illustrations-with-martha-stewart https://thecurrent.educatorinnovator.org/resource/when-image...
mc32 4y ago
I don't completely agree. If what she presented was a "narrative" for a specific audience, I think that's fine. Sort of like literary fiction vs non-fiction story writing. We have historical fiction where we mix past and present real and fake. I don't see why a conceptual artists can't do the same with their photography/art --unless they were completely deceiving their audience for manipulation or monetary gain, i.e. fraud. On the other hand it seems people are using her images without permission and passing them as authentic—which if we’re talking about transgressions, would be worse.

aaron695 4y ago

matkoniecz 4y ago

For me the worst part of that is progressing destruction of trust. People keep running into things like that all the time, for me previous case was being assigned a completely fake quote in some local news website (luckily, they had neither my name nor photo). If someone is unsure why some people claim that global warming is fake, smog is not harmful and so on - that is because we have far too many lies and people willing to defend clear liars. As result many people flail looking for trustworthy data source. And typically end with even worse, but for many distinction was not clear.

glonq 4y ago
TBH nothing pushes me towards misanthropy more than the sad realization that virtually everything nowadays is either heavily exaggerated or just outright fake/lies. And it's not even the actual dishonesty that bugs me, it's the fact that we have been conditioned to accept this as okay.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Non-story? Photography is by default understood to be creative work, the very first thing people do is replace entire sky with computer generated imagery if it doesn't look interesting enough. There are certainly situations where authentic reproduction is important - law, journalism, documentary, medicine. And if she used someone else's photos without credit/permission, that's a problem. But that family portrait or pack of wolves shot over your mantelpiece? Edited! If you really want to look at your pimples or nearby hiker's behind every day, negotiate that with the photographer. But most people want art, not a police mugshot in these situations. I am not saying there is nothing there, just that malice is not proven and someone has wasted a lot of time refuting what has not been explicitly claimed. I would buy a print if I like, the price was right and especially if money went to a good cause. If anything, I would want the close up one to be brightened/de-hazed for my living room, even though nature doesn't always look like that.