A Treatise On Landscape Photography’s Dark Side

a potentially disturbing trend has emerged and become quite popular, especially on social media – not only are landscape photographers using Photoshop to control contrast, white balance, saturation, and sharpening, they are also using it to: add in objects that were not in the photograph such as a person, meteors, the moon, a mountain, or the Milky Way core; add objects that are literally not even possible to be seen in the scene depicted such as galactic objects, the moon, and the Milky Way core; or, to grossly exaggerate the size of certain objects such as mountains, lakes, rivers, people, etc. On the surface, it seems that certain landscape photographers have become so desperate for a sliver of social media attention in a suddenly over-crowded field that they are incapable of restraint. Or, it’s just art, let it be. Which one?