A Tale of Two Moons: Peter Lik’s Photographs Called Out by Science
There are lots of &quot;lies&quot; told with fine art photography.  I&#x27;d see a photo of a cool bird in an awesome tree and wonder how long the photographer had to wander around the woods to get close enough to a bird to photograph it that well.  Then I learned the trick was to cut off a branch from a nice tree and put in on a tripod near a bird feeder with another large photo as the background.  I use a similar technique with macro photography, bringing bugs into my kitchen and creating a small scene for them.  Yet, even when I tell people how they were done, they&#x27;re still impressed.  And I&#x27;m still impressed by good bird photos, as well as photos taken with many other &quot;tricks&quot; I&#x27;ve learned.<p>But I think there&#x27;s a clear difference in what Lik has done here and all of the other styles of tricks.  It doesn&#x27;t have anything to do with &quot;in camera&quot; vs. Photoshop.  I can take an impressive photo of a spider standing on a sheet of paper, the scene I set up is more to avoid adding distracting things into the photo rather than to &quot;lie&quot; to the viewer.  Also, virtually every photo you&#x27;ve seen of the Milky Way with a clear foreground view is a composite, but it&#x27;s a composite of at least one, possibly two impressive photos that could stand on their own.<p>When you look at Lik&#x27;s photo in the linked article, the individual photos are completely unimpressive in every way.  The only thing that makes them impressive is the composite.  The reality of it is, any rank amateur could have produced that photo.  And I think that&#x27;s way so many more people consider this type of &quot;lie&quot; worse than all of the other &quot;lies&quot; that appear in all types of photography.