Dearie says this photograph comes from a blog called Naked Capitalism. It’s a great picture of a goat climbing a cliff — and you can’t quite tell if the goat is going to make it — but I’ve had to remove it from here because I don’t want to get in trouble for breeching a copyright. Of course once other animals have rights it’s going to be the goat who owns the copyright rather than some huge German- or US-owned publishing blob.
The photograph hasn’t been rotated, you can see that from the upright stance of the animal in the background.
Update: Not rotated, but on the other hand as Nij points out below it’s been bloody photoshopped. They just cut out the goat picture and stuck it on top of a rock picture. Swines.
A Bad Guide 
I should have said – I saw it at the Naked Capitalism blog.
The funny thing is one would LIKE to know who took it and where and under what circumstances and whether there were preceding and subsequent photos, &c. So maybe the photographer will reveal itself if we keep following that link.
Yes. I agree, I’d like to know.
Oops – sorry for the bother.
It’s absolutely no bother, dearie — well, not caused by you, anyway. Thank you so much for showing us the picture in the first place. I just happen to be caught up in the subject of copyright at the moment.
I liked the photo too, as I said. The bother was instigated by me, probably. Sorry to have been so paranoid and the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh about these copyright matters, but my Luhmann-photo experience did take me completely by surprise, and what I have since learned about the issues has made me very defensive.
I am passing on this knowledge free of charge, although it cost me 400 Euros! Jeez, is there no gratitude in the world? [I wonder whether the rhetorical figure represented by the last two sentences has a technical Latin name: something like “poor little old me”, or “you can trust me, because I went through it and am here to tell you about it”, except formulated in Latin to make it solemn and proper-like]
I don’t want to get in trouble for breeching a copyright
That’s exactly what they do, just like the PhysEd teacher in high school who was responsible for corporal punishment when you had screwed up royally. You have to pull down your breeches, and submit to the paddle – a wooden slat with holes in it, so the blows make more noise than they otherwise would.
Any teacher who tried that here would get themselves a nice jail cell–minus their teaching license.
It’s photoshopped. I saved it, then opened it with Paint, at a magnification large enough to see individual pixels. You can tell especially around the horns and tail. Kron is right though, anyone who makes money from the photo should buy the goat some Purina Goat Chow, or whatever it is they eat besides trees.
Dammit, you’re right, Nij. It hadn’t occurred to me, but when I blow it up in p-shop I see the same effect. No wonder I couldn’t quite figure out what the feet were standing on; they weren’t.
That makes it even more likely to be copyrighted
It was probably the ambulance chasers who did it. No better at photoshop than they are at copyright law.
I guess I just have a premodern mind — it didn’t even occur to me that it might be photoshopped, but now that I look at it with that idea in mind, yeah, of course it must be photoshopped. I’m glad some of you know how to determine these things.
It’s not hard to discover once you start to imagine yourself behind a camera trying to get a shot like that. First, how would you get the shot in the first place? The human finger can’t move that fast. You would have to know the goat was planning to do that and then wait with your finger on the button, but you still wouldn’t get it. It would be hard even if you had the goat do the same thing over and over. I suppose you could do it with technology–there are cameras you can set for several simultaneous shots–but mechanical parts can only move so fast too, and I suspect you would have the same problem with trying to capture that exact instant.
Second, the goat is showing no motion. Think of how Kron’s goats’ ears move when they bound down a hill. The goat on the hill would have to be in continuous movement to be in that position, and yet no movement has been captured by the camera.
Third, where is the goat’s shadow? This is why the photo seems subtly wrong. If you look at the shadow on the rock, the sun should be somewhere behind the goat’s left shoulder. The goat’s shadow should be on the rock. How do you get a goat to put its feet like that? Do they do that when they take a nap?
Fourth, didn’t everyone laugh? That doesn’t mean it was staged for sure, but it reeks of a human mind. Who knows, maybe in the originally context, before everyone started laughing and reposting it without the copyright information, maybe it was identified as a composite photo.
I bet Kron’s goats could star in an even better version…
I didn’t question its authenticity until you did.