Canon Shares Composite Photo Made with a Fujifilm Camera Without Credit
Canon recently shared a beautiful Golden Hour landscape photograph on social media in Italy and Spain. Problem was, it was a composite photo in which a large portion of the image was taken without permission (and without giving credit) from a photo by well-known landscape photographer Elia Locardi.
Here’s a larger version of the photo published by Canon:
The photo looked strangely similar to this photograph by Locardi:
While the bottom portion and most of the foreground are noticeably different in the two shots, the sky and some of the trees in Canon’s composite were clearly extracted from Locardi’s work.
But that’s not all. Fstoppers also reports that the photo wasn’t even shot on a Canon camera: Locardi captured it using a Fujifilm X-T1.
Oops. That’s embarrassing.
Update: It has been discovered that the photo posted by Canon was uploaded as a free photo to the service Unsplash by someone who goes by the name “Greg Paul Miller.”
Canon’s social media people presumably found this photo, saw that the EXIF data has “Canon EOS-1D Mark IV” as the camera of origin, and decided to share it on the company’s social media accounts.
It’s was a simple way of obtaining free social media content, but one that backfired on Canon in this particular case due to an infringement they weren’t aware of.
