Flattery or Plagiarism

This is going to be an interesting post and if anyone actually reads it and chooses to comment it’ll likely be some interesting commentary too.

About a Year ago as I started to post more actively about my photography I put out an image of the New Zealand Tūī that I shot in bright daylight as I was testing my secondhand Sigma 60-600mm lens purchase. The original image was ok, but messy, with flax and other bush and plants behind the bird. I used to be a big fan of “The Strobist’s” work back in the day, whereby you take a shot on full auto, check what the camera thinks is a reasonable set of exposure, ISO and shutter speed setting and then basically drop all your exposure setting down by a couple of stops or more and use a flash to light the subject. This basically blacks out the background, or at the very least makes it very dark and lifts the subject off the background without the need for backdrops etc.

The photo I took at the time wasn’t done this way but I knew I could mimic this in post.

New Zealand Tūī, taken around November 2025.

The image above is the result and I was quite happy with it. I posted it to a New Zealand Photo page and it was lauded and I received offers of prints which was very generous.

Lately on the Facebook page Birds of New Zealand (official) and individual has posted a strikingly similar image, in fact not one but two.
Now of course I can’t claim this is a direct copy of my image, but it feels uncannily like his images have indeed been copied from my original ideas and photos.

I haven’t called him out on it, because… well why.

Should I be flattered or is it just pure plagiarism, what do you think.