Nature Photography 104: Part 4: This bird stands alone

To make a very long story short, I keep finding myself annoyed with nature photography. I was very worked up a few days ago, when I became quite confident that the winner of a fairly large photo contest must have edited/doctored the photo... I then look at said persons website, and found some very blatant editing along with large amounts of shameless self-promotion as a truly expert photographer. 

This really wasn't anything new, but I learned something from it: People can do whatever the heck they want, and I shouldn't care about it. If it bothers me, I can just focus on how I conduct myself and my photography! And with that said, I had the idea to reveal some of the work done on my own photos on my personal website. 

Are you ready for a look at everything you may or may not already know about nature photography? I'll post the website version first, followed by the totally un-edited original.

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Here’s where Nature Photography 104 becomes little more than a confession, but I hope you find it interesting. This instalment uses similar principles to part 2 (digital chainsaw), but is more along the lines of a digital shotgun.. With a silencer.. Anyways..... 

It isn’t the removal of branches, but the removal of birds all together! The above example is somewhat mild, but you can see that I’ve totally removed this birds partner. I photographed this pair of AWPE’s on my Florida adventure... 

It’s a classic example of “how much” or “how far do I take it” when it comes to the removal of animals from the frame. The above example really just was a “sliver” of pelican that I had to take out to get a clean image of the single bird. Yet there may be people who think this is too far. Is it ok to remove 10 birds from a picture to get that “clean” shot? What if it’s a species that has a strong flocking habit, and you rarely see them like this?

Just some hypothetical questions I’m not really looking to have answered. Just sharing some photo work that I’ve done, and I hope you find it interesting.