A 14 year old at the outreach event made me rethink how I frame every shot

Last Saturday I was helping at the public telescope setup near the lake. This kid walks up, looks at my stacked Andromeda image on the laptop, and says 'why does it look fake?' I started explaining stacking and tracking and he just cut me off. He said 'no, I mean why is it so perfect? Real things have noise.' He was right. I spend hours removing every speck, smoothing every gradient, chasing that clean astrophotography look. But his phone pic of the moon with a wobbly hand had more life than my last 40 exposures. So now I leave a little noise in my final edits. Not a lot, just enough so it feels like a photo instead of a render. Anyone else stop over-processing after a random comment like that?

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river_hart1828d ago

Aw man, kids really out here roasting our whole hobby and being right about it. Now I gotta go back through my old shots and see which ones look like they came out of a video game.