Photographer Terje Hellesö, recipient of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's Nature Photographer of the Year award, has been reported to police after admitting that he manipulated a number of his pictures of predatory animals.
"The controversy arose when wildlife care consultant and blogger for the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management (Svenska Jägareförbundet), Gunnar Glöersen, received a call from a journalist asking him to examine a suspicious looking picture of a lynx.
"Doesn't this lynx in the July greenery have a winter furr? How about the lynx that's reflected in the pool, is it walking in the air or on land, and can you really see the paws in that angle?", Glöersen wrote in a blog post dated August 26th.
Glöersen also questioned the authenticity of the picture, and decided to examine more of Hellesö’s work.
Based on his wildlife expertise, he began to suspect that Hellesö’s alleged accomplishments were simply too good to be true.
Among Hellesö’s claims called into question by Glöersen are reports that the nature photographer had seen 150 lynx in nine months, when Glöersen himself had only seen 15 in 52 years.
Read more here: http://www.thelocal.se/35964/20110905/ and here: http://www.fotosidan.se/cldoc/terje-helles-behaller-titeln-arets-naturfotograf.htm"
The last one is in Swedish but I used Chrome to translate it and the result was quite legible.
