A Tale of Two Moons: Peter Lik’s Photographs Called Out by Science

For some definition of "best" !

Pictures succeed or fail on their own merit, not on how much work was needed.

otoh House painting we value by how much work was needed.

How disappointing it must be to learn that so many of those widely admired Ansel Adams' photos were taken from the road side, standing on his car roof.

> "stealing"

Now you're just name-calling.

What I'm saying, that in my read, photography is capturing something, that, for at least a brief second, existed in the physical reality, as it was.

"Retouching" is not what Ansel Adams called his darkroom work. In my experience, retouching usually refers to removing or reshaping elements of a photograph (usually a portrait) to make the subject look more appealing. In a portrait this might be removing blemishes, smoothing out visible skin pores, removing blood vessels from the sclera of the eye, shifting outlines to make a person look thinner, etc. In a landscape it might mean removing telephone lines from a corner, flipping a mountain, adding or changing a moon, etc.

I think these things are generally not OK, and definitely not OK to hide (pretending the photo was "out of the camera"). Granted, there are certain areas where it is so common (like fashion magazine covers) that complaining about it is like shouting at the tides. But there are other areas, like natural landscapes, where the fight is worth it IMO.

Ansel Adams referred to his work as printing... the aesthetic choices were just part of the printing process. Occasionally they did stray into the realm of retouching; in one photo he burned a hillside unnaturally dark to hide graffiti from a local school. But in most cases he was adjusting tonality, not hiding or removing elements of the photos themselves.

And it's important to recognize in Adams the challenge of capturing the negative in the first place. Perhaps his most famous print is "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM", and in Examples he talks about using his knowledge of luminance values to realize that he could retain detail in both the foreground and the moon in a single negative.

Yes he liked to burn the sky when he printed that image, but it's certainly arguable that that was an interpretation of what he captured in a single negative. I think we would feel differently about that photograph if it came out later that he pasted the moon from a different negative into a boring shot of a cemetery.

Finally, I agree with you that the film context matters. Personally, I am less tolerant of post-processing adjustments to color positive landscapes than I am to black and white landscapes, because of the practice and traditions of so many color-positive landscape masters to "finish the shot in the camera."

Photoshopping the saturation of an average sunset into "WOW alpenglow" values is gross to me; there was a time when the only way to get those sunset colors was actually to be in the high alpine terrain at the right time. Those early photographers created the value of such an image by showing phenomena and places that most people had never seen. Late Photoshoppers are just riding that perception of value.

The bpotu photo is the one that looks the most like the moon is over clouds, but I think that's just because the right side of the moon is so bright and the clouds there are so thin. But even there it does appear to be very slight discoloration caused by the clouds intersecting the moon.

For birds that don't come to bird feeders, there are other techniques. E.g. if you want to shoot bald eagles, you can go to lock and dam 14 on the Mississippi (Le Claire, Iowa). People use slingshots to shoot fish out into the river so the eagles will dive in close.

There are forums for birding groups to post where rare birds have been spotted hanging out. Photographers will "flock" there and bait the birds to get a shot. So, a bit of a combination of going to the bird and bringing it to you.

For a hobbyist, spending hours out in the woods, to maybe get a shot, maybe in descent lighting, might make for a fun, relaxing way to spend some time. But people counting on getting shots for a living are going to use whatever methods make them efficient. The "honest" photographers will get beat out of the market by competition.