What a marvelous photo, the one above – a perfectly framed mid-air plane, captured from below a ladder and its cage! It looks almost too good to be true, right?
That’s what hundreds of fans thought when this image took a Nikon award in a contest called “Look Up”. The nearly-impossible shot raised suspicions in the midst of amateur and professional photographers, so they started analyzing it carefully to see whether there was some sort of post-processing involved. Indeed, the photo was a fake.
Chay Yu Wei entered the photo in the competition innocently, without mentioning any sort of photo editing. The guy took a chance. The real problem was Nikon experts didn’t see it coming. They congratulated Yu Wei, before checking if the photo was altered.
One of the fans, though, opened it up in Photoshop, changed the adjustment levels and revealed the copy-pasted plane. After Shaun Ho’s discovery, countless fans began to transform the image in hilarious memes (a part of them can be seen in the gallery above).
image credits: Shaun Ho
Yu Wei maintained that he didn’t try to trick anyone, writing on Instagram that “I would have done it with Photoshop if I really meant to lie about it, but no, it was a playful edit using the PicsArt app and uploaded to Instagram”. As for Nikon, they immediately removed the competition page, along with everybody’s memes, promising to “tighten our image review process to avoid similar situations in the future”.
gallery photo credits: Glenn Guan (Godzilla), SG Yu (Van Damme), Vato915 (Waldo), Randy DeWitt Wei Ming (Woman), Tom Ignatius, Render Brant (train)
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