It could be asked to what extent my images on this site are truthful. I would answer that if you had stood next to my camera at the moment of exposure you would absolutely have recognised the scene in front of you as being the same scene shown here on nightfolio. However, that is not to say that I have not changed the raw images that were initially recorded on the film or camera sensor.

I trained in a film darkroom, and have routinely applied the same kind of edits that would have been possible there to my images here on this website. I have freely edited the images in terms of colour balance, colour intensity and contrast. I have locally removed dust spots, guano streaks, aeroplane trails and film scratches. Where there is grass surrounding my main subject, I have also often removed random distracting marks from this. However, I have never added details to my photographs. Nor have I combined details from different scenes to create new (and in my view dishonest) composite images:

Stars As Points Of Light

I have not used moving tracking devices to follow the stars in any of my images, instead I have used static cameras (equipped with fast lenses) set to "freeze" the stars with short exposures.

Of course, using fast lenses wide open leads to restricted depth of focus, so that a foreground landscape subject cannot be rendered sharply at the same time as the distant sky. In such cases I have often made two identical exposures of the same scene, one focussed on the foreground, and another on the background. The sharpest elements of these two exposures are then layer masked together to form one unified and completely sharp image. I do not regard such focus stacking as fakery, more a legitimate correction to inherent limitations in the photographic process.
 

Basic Principles Of Acceptable Manipulation

None of my images are the product of artificial intelligence, all are location photographs made by me with a camera, then digitally edited by me using my own skill and judgment. I believe that my attitude to digital manipulation generally is broadly similar to that expressed by G Dan Mitchell in his 2013 post on Fredmiranda.com:

"If we present ourselves as artists who are able to see and create artistic work based on things of beauty in the real world, we hope that those who see our work will believe that it is honest. (And "honest" is not the same as "perfect objective analog" .....).  In other words, they look at our work and trust that the place shown, the light under which the photograph was made, the conjunction of seemingly miraculous elements, and our vision are connected to real experiences and things and places. They can and should accept and even expect that we take steps to enhance and optimize the presentation of the images so that they will be effective as photographs or as photographic prints, but they presume that we enhance more than we invent. In fact, I think that many of us - even those of us who are perfectly happy to optimize images in these rather common ways - believe that we are presenting "subjectively truthful" images of things. Viewers grant us trust that our vision is special and that we see in the real world things that others might miss and that we see them in ways that others might not share."

I would say that an attempt needs to be made to balance the creative possibilities offered by digial manipulation (the prerogative of the artist) against the risk of destroying the essential truthfullness of the image (the prerogative of the viewing human being). The viewer expects the work to have been altered enough to replicate the subjective experience/thoughts of the artist, but the viewer should not be fed artificial delusions. Technological mental illness should not be our ultimate goal here.

There are very profound threats to such a moderate approach to night photography:

1. Arch of the Milky Way montages (AOFTMW)

In 2024, if you described yourself as a night photographer, a member of the public might well assume that your main activity would be the building of AOFTMW images. This would be understandable, such images are visually impressive and are reproduced all over the place.

AOFTMW montages are composite images of the milky way created from multiple overlapping photographs of the sky (often using a star tracker), stitched together automatically using advanced computer image processing techiques, digitally blended with a foreground/landscape image.

The first time I saw an AOFTMW montage I was simply stunned. Amazed, truly. By the time I saw my 500th AOFTMW montage the effect was less impressive, and by the time I saw my 5000th such image I was bored/irritated. The vast majority of these images are fundamentally the same! So often they do not communicate anything individual about the mind or experience of the photographer, they are largely "recipe" images. As such they often cease to be artistic communications, but product, merely.

Furthermore AOFTMW images risk corrupting the audience into believing that night photographs have to be visually extravagant. In the past night photography was often about the subtlety of night, its moods and gradations of meaning. Thanks to AOFTMW, night photography is nowadays so often top heavy with technological involvement - pimped up and blaring.

2. Artificial Intelligence

From the perspective of 2024, we are witnessing the emergence of computer based systems which promise to "create" photo quality artificial images of imaginary scenes. These programs work by cobbling together existing human created images taken from the internet. The resulting simulated new "photograph" can be of any scene, anything at all, the only limit being the human operator's ability to type keywords into the computer in the first place. The consequence of this for graphic designers, fine artists and photographers is obvious. Computers, that can churn out millions of fake but cheap/free images, will eat the livelihoods of thousands of creative human beings. Pay a human graphic designer to create a new company logo?  Pay a human photographer for a pack shot? AI will provide both without having to instruct a human creator, brief them, pay them, take time and effort, think even. The future of the creative world suddenly looks very bleak indeed, at least if you need to earn your living from it, or care about creativity. I truly wonder if the visual arts, in any human sense, will survive at all.

Furthermore AI imagery represents a fundamental attack on the truthfullness of images, even the artistic, human "subjective truth" referred to earlier on this webpage. With an AI system, anyone could generate photographic "evidence" that pigs can fly, that unicorns ride skateboards on moonlit roads, anything at all. Seeing a "photograph" will no longer establish any kind of truth at all, apart from an ability to type on a computer keyboard.

AI risks destroying night photography because it will easily generate fake but visually impressive bespoke  imagery, I wonder in 15 years how many photographers are going to bother getting out of bed, grab their camera, and go out into the cold to seek the atmosphere of the night. Much easier to just type in a description of a required image and sit back as the machine does the rest.