What is a Composite Photo?

With the advent of photoshop, there is not always a guarantee that the photo you are looking at is exactly what was there when the photo was taken. Terms of describing the photos have come up, and left some newer photographers uncertain as to what means what.

A composite photo, is where you have created an image using more than one photograph. Some camera clubs, exhibitions or competitions consider these to be Creative, or Altered Reality. There is no hard and fast rule on this, but one thing is for sure, if you have used more than one photograph in an image it is a composite. Altered reality composites are ones where, you are not going to see anything like it in real life. Like the space fairy in the image above.

Some camera clubs will use a term Photo-realistic. This means, you have a composite image, but what you are looking at could conceivably be real. In the photo above, you probably won’t see that kind of tractor in a field like that, but you could. They all exist and are reasonably in context. I.e. there is no giant hooded Death with a scythe reaping souls, it is just a field of rapeseed flowers and a tractor.

This is still a composite image. I took the photo of the sky, the photo of the fields and the photo of the tractor and combined the three as a composite. This is called a photo-realistic image.

Now, it is possible to change images quite a lot, without actually making them a composite. In this image of the Lynx aircraft above, I have changed it from day to night, and created a blur on the propellors and created a beam of light effect. This is only one photograph, so it is not a composite. This is what you would call a manipulated image.

You can use manipulated images in open competitions, but there are some competitions (usually nature or wildlife) which have really strict rules, and, a manipulated image is not allowed because it alters the truth of what was there.

This peacock is SOOC. i.e. it is “straight out of camera.” I have not altered it in any way except to crop it.

Now, if you are entering camera club images, some competitions vary on what they allow, even for straight out of the camera images, so check the rules carefully. For example, they may not allow photos of animals in captivity, or may not allow them with any man-made elements to the image (so no houses, fences etc).

But straight out of camera literally means that, you have fiddled and diddled!