1. **this is a new format where I had the idea for the piece 30 seconds ago and I'm gonna write and post it right now**
2. I'm only passing through for an edit once no matter how badly I wanna run back through
3. Let's tentatively call this series: So I was Thinking 
I was watching a youtube video about the cinematography of Primetime (2026) which, as a person named Oscar, I insist be awarded the Oscar for Cinematography.
In it they’re discussing the unhinged methods of camera work and lighting and it gets me thinking about the “controversies” surrounding Lance’s particular style of documentary filmmaking which involves quite a bit of staging and camera work. He insists it’s representative of reality with a bit of flair stacked on top and I believe him. But this is not what I’m writing about just go see You Can See Everything (2026).
Those arguments about documentary filmmaking bring me back to my early days on the Internet, on Instagram, on National Geographic photography comments sections, etc. Reading comments from folks who are quite disappointed to learn that a photo was composited or used long exposures or had the saturation boosted or whatever else.
Folks who feel that this makes the image Fake. That the location is not actually that cool in real life. That once they get their grubby, greasy fingers off their laptop keyboard and hike through the snow up that craggly peak and set up their $15.4k camera setup and point it at the snow and the stars and the moon that it’s not going to look like the picture they saw on the internet that day.
That the stars won’t be as bright and that the moon looks much too small and the snow much too cold.
And I always wanted to tell those people, much in the way I want to tell the people complaining about stylization in documentary filmmaking (which I admit is a much slacker slack line to walk barefoot and smelly across) that while yes, you can use the tools of creativity to make a once real scene Fake or even use your paint and your brushes to create an idealized version of the nobleman whomst hired you to paint their lovely ugly bride or even devise a hoax to fool a gullible public into raucous fear of creatures lurking depths below–
that the artistry in editing images taken from our complex and impossible reality is not trying to recreate reality’s base platonic form only knowable by God almighty but is to recreate the feeling of the perceiver, of the imaginer, of the human being who did climb that mountain in the snow in the night to capture a beauty only they themselves will ever have known and yet they are attempting to share some fickle part of this wonderous sensation with a drooling public. And perhaps a financial sum provided the image is attractive to enough of the drooling public to also be attractive to advertisers or noblemen with a proclivity for the arts
IN CONCLUSION:
When you see a photo with clear evidence of alteration and without latent political motivations: perhaps don’t think “fake photoshop not real dumb!” but instead perhaps think this:
“Ah, what bliss this photographer must’ve felt in dim lantered villas of a snow blanketed Zürich on such a winter’s eve; how gracious of them to composite the cozy winding trails of light and prosperity against an impossibly exposed and radiant cosmos. One day may I be so lucky as to stand where they stood, and perceive the glory that only reality–with all of it’s obscurities–can skewer unyielding through my mortal soul and perhaps for just one shattered moment I’ll see–no–feel the image that guided me here.”