[9dev]

More so than just the colors, capturing moving northern lights at night invariably means capturing an aggregation over a long time. That isn’t just capturing something we can’t natively parse, but aggregating data into something new.

Think someone who only ever saw waterfalls in long-time exposure shots, these frozen, milky streams that look nothing like actual water, while still being pretty to look at. Would you say that person has an understanding of what a waterfall actually looks like? No. But do they see something that is there, but others wouldn’t be able to sense in reality? Also no, as long as we use a subjective experience of time as the baseline.

[dylan604]

Capturing motion with timelapse and/or long exposure again is just a way of showing us things that we cannot “capture” on our own. We know the sky moves, we know the auroras change shape, intensity, colors, but on a timescale slower than our perception can handle. Capturing that through a camera just proves that, and is not making things up.

Your premise is just too out there. Someone only ever having seen long exposure of a waterfall is just so preposterous, and is more guilty of making shit up than the GP’s concern over faking imagery by pushing contrast/saturation in images. Yours is just totally made up nonsense trying to make a point while the other is just enhancing real data.

[9dev]

It was an analogy. Most people have only ever seen northern lights in Timelapse shots, and thus have no clue how the real thing differs. Capturing auroras in a photo creates a visualisation of their movement in the sky, and not an accurate representation of what the phenomenon looks like.

[dylan604]

But it does look like that. You just don't have the patience to and persistence of vision to see it. You keep making it sound like the camera is making up the image. It's not. It's what is there. The auroras are not static like you are making it out to be. None of this photography is showing unnatural imagery. Why is this confusing?