Photographer Finds Samsung Purchased Her DSLR Photo to Promote Their Camera Phone's Capabilities

Photographer Finds Samsung Purchased Her DSLR Photo to Promote Their Camera Phone's Capabilities

A photographer has outed Samsung after she caught them using her photo to demonstrate the alleged capabilities of their new Galaxy A8 Star. What’s more, in the post she wrote about it on DIYPhotography, she revealed the photo in question was taken with a DSLR.

Dunja Djudjic had been using photo licensing site EyeEm, a partner of Getty, to sell some of her images. A few weeks ago, she received an email congratulating her on a photo sale. The image was, in her own words, “a portrait of me goofing around.”

Intrigued by its usage, Djudjic took to Google’s reverse image search tool in an attempt to find exactly where it had been placed on the internet. Surprised to find it on Samsung’s website, the image had been photoshopped to adjust her skin and also hair colour. Her natural eye blood vessels had all but been removed, too.

Interestingly, she had been cut out of the photo and pasted onto a new image of a park. Djudjic’s original image had been shot with a shallow depth-of-field, and in need of a sharper background, Samsung had stuck the portrait onto an entirely new picture, for use in their before and after slider.

The photo as it appears on Samsung's website.

It takes months to get image sales info through from EyeEm, but Djudjic is confident the phone giant has legitimately purchased the photo for its usage. However, it’s strange and somewhat misleading that they would use a photo taken with a DSLR and fake it for an example of the Galaxy A8 Star’s capabilities, even if they were just illustrating depth of field effects. You know, if the phone’s camera is so great and all.

This story comes from Dunja Djudjic and was originally posted on DIY Photography. You can see more of Djudjic's work at her Behance, Flickr and EyeEm.

Jack Alexander's picture

A 28-year-old self-taught photographer, Jack Alexander specialises in intimate portraits with musicians, actors, and models.

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