Is it ethical to modify stock photos?

I must admit that I am prone to modifying my images to try to tell the story better – I’ve been known to replace a person without a model release with one that I have approval from – but in my mind that is still a great image for telling a climbing story!

I went to Bahrain a couple of weeks back and took some images that I really liked, but there were distracting elements. In the first case, a wooden dhow, the background was really poor. I couldn’t move the boat, and the positioning on the dusty sand gave a nice impression of the dry desert and perhaps even how water use is making life difficult for fishermen as some lakes and small seas recede from the original coastline.

I first of all tried to blur the background – that worked reasonably well, but still didn’t tell the story I had in my mind. So I decided to remove the offending huts and vehicles altogether to make it appear that the boat was on the dusty sand with the desert disappearing into the haze:

The evening before I had been at the old fort at Seef, and had a lovely sunset sky above the floodlit restored fort, but I was only in Bahrain for a couple of days and the tide was not right for the shot. If I had time, I could have visited at sunset at high tide, but that is often very difficult for a roving stock photographer. My image looked like this (it was an HDR from 5 shots to capture some detail in the shadowed sandy areas in the foreground).

Nice picture of the castle, not so nice in the foreground. Of course I could crop it to just show the fort, but the ocean is part of the story, and so I worked the image in Photoshop with the Flood plugin to add a reflection that could be the ocean at high tide. I’m sure that at some time during the year it actually looks like this!

So – the ethical question. This isn’t really photo journalism, but it could be used in a travel magazine about a visit to Bahrain. Is it acceptable to change the foreground like this?