I don't buy her excuse. She's a complete fraud and she has no business dealing with NG. This isn't small touch-ups, this is wholesale cloning manipulations to create art with the intention to deceive, not capture reality.

I agree. National Geographic needs to fire/distance themselves from Beth Moon and retract their story with a public correction.

like they fired Steve McCurry, the now "visual storyteller" and no longer a photojournalist?

McCurried: an unfortunate event that seems to occur while one is out of town and can only be attributed to "the intern."

Aside from the complete lie from either Moon or her intern, all it would take is one look at the images to see they are completely unrealistic. If Moon was actually taking photos of the night time sky at these locations, she would know/remember to some degree what the MW looked like. The fact she tried to pass these off as real, regardless of any cloning or sky replacements her intern did, shows a total disregard to her integrity.

If you want to make art, great! Make art and leave it up to artistic interpretation. But don't claim that "art" is "journalism."

To be fair, no one is claiming this is journalism. Also to expect such high accuracy from NGeo, a magazine which basically sells psuedo exotic adventures to people sitting at home doing nothing, is to think too highly of them.

Moon's excuse is total BS on her part as she doesn't seem to understand how completed debunked her photos are, due to how much we know the night sky. To give an example, it's like she has shown us a photo of the Lincoln Memorial with TWO Lincoln in it, and then telling us the "mistake" is from stitching up a panoramic photo.

If she would just come out, apologize, and perhaps give an excuse about her pursue of "art" blinded her eyes, we might give her a bit of leeway. However, she doubled down with a lie and dig her own grave even deeper.

Not to mention her "explaination" exposes the fact she doesn't know how to shoot and stitch a pano to begin with.

Kinda reminds me when Anthony Wiener tweeted a photo of his...self...to an intern and then denied ever sending it only to confess several weeks later lol. But yes, saying something like "I wanted to recreate what it felt like to be in such a beautiful place bla bla bla didn't intend for the NatGeo community to take these photos as factual, but instead see them as art bla bla bla" would have really saved her in this instance.

It's an image, made of different photos, and then badly manipulated. I would never expected something like that, after seeing her photobook Ancient Trees Portrait of Time.
A shame.

Nat Geo has a mission statement that they are committed to exploring and protecting the world, they inspire new generations. it doesn't say anything about journalistic integrity. if they need to flub a few photos to interest kids in conservancy, why not?

But NatGeo does have a set of photo guidelines - https://yourshot.nationalge...

and cloning is not allowed:

Cloning
Cloning is not allowed. Cloning is the process of adding to or subtracting elements from a photograph. An example would be removing a pole from behind a person’s head in a portrait, adding people to a crowd, or mirroring repetitive objects. - https://yourshot.nationalge...

You may see it as not saying "anything about journalistic integrity," but there is an expectation that the photos submitted will adhere to the guidelines. Doesn't matter if "the intern did it," the photographer is submitting the work as their own, and to make up some BS about "warping during the stitching from using the transformation tool" as an excuse is worse than the actual violation.

"And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules."

If you have to lie to sell your agenda, what does that say for your agenda.

Not necessarily much.

What if I told 100 people "if you all pick up the garbage from this beach, each of you gets $100". They do it, but I don't give them anything (I lied). Still, the beach is now clean, which was my intention. Did the lie made my agenda (a clean beach) not worth it?

The boy who cried wolf tried that theory. Adults should already know better than to try it, too.

Yes, It did. Next time those people will not only not believe another reasons to clean the beach, many of them will litter as a revenge. The end does not always justify the means.

Uuppp. Lie to the kids to get them interested but for them to later realize they were lied to.,. Just in time for them to turn their back on society.

So, after getting them hooked to the environment, the worry is that at some point they'll realize "Gee, I just learned that those Botswana milky way shots were cloned and Photoshopped!" and go "Real nature is sh*t, let's pollute it!"?

I think you didn't get one of the main principles and concept of integrity that NatGeo tries to sell and supposedly follows.

When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. then there are no more answers, only better and better lies.

If you wish to live in a lie, that's your decision. I'd say most of us want to see true images of nature when we check out any NG work.

Funny how it's ALWAYS an unnamed intern. They always seem to have either some tragic life event taking place or are away traveling which affects their ability to respond too.

Yep.

Hmmm - maybe it's the same intern. Moving quietly from job to job, leaving a trail of deception and destruction in their wake, ha ha.

I think I found the intern: https://petapixel.com/2018/...

LOL

ha ha!

Great plot for a Stephen King novel.

Typhoid Intern!

Probably the same damn intern that turned Steve McCurry into a meme...

Well done Adrien thanks for doing this work.

You're welcome Brian!

The real question is. What other lies are they feeding us?

It's all lies...

Adrien, speaking as someone who's only vaguely familiar with astrophotography, it'd be awesome if you posted pictures of what the milky way *should* look like in Namibia so that the unversed can more easily see the differences.

Also, I'm unclear on what the circles in the last pictures indicate. Particularly the green one.

As far as the issue of Moon editing the pictures go, I'm fine with that -- it's her photography, it's her choice. These images belong in an art mag, though. Not a science one. What I really take issue with is Nat Geo's editor. Not long ago, they posted this: https://www.nationalgeograp...

I'll quote the relevant parts:
We work with the most admired photographers in the world, but just like we require our writers to provide their notes, we require photographers on assignment to submit “raw” files of their images, which contain pixel information straight from the digital camera’s sensor. We request the same for Your Shot photos sent in by members of the public or stock images we buy. If a raw file isn’t available, we ask detailed questions about the photo. And, yes, sometimes what we learn leads us to reject it.

So either an editor at NG saw the pictures and raw files and thought, "NBD", or they didn't check the raw. Both are problematic. NG's articles are often referenced in school kids' research. I like to read their articles to broaden my education, even though I'm no longer in school. How can we trust their articles' accuracy if they feel it's okay to play fast and loose with the images?

Hey Jen,
I unfortunately don't have personal photos from Namibia. However you can easily find tons of accurate photos if you google image 'milky way arch Namibia'. More simply you can download the free app Sky Guide and set your location to Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. then scroll the time back and forth to see how the milky moves across the sky at night and during the year :) This is what I always use!!

TY for sharing that info. It's helpful and gives me an idea of where to look.

Even if the images hadn't been published in NG, there's still a serious ethical problem here. These images have been published in a book, displayed in exhibits, and featured in various articles. In all cases the accompanying narrative is the same: an adventure in Namibia and Botswana, spending days scouting for the perfect spot, marking spots to return to them at night, etc. Yet the pictures are rough composites of various foregrounds and backgrounds that don't match at all. In some images the foreground was even photographed during the day. That's just lying.

If she had presented the images as "hey, here's a collection of random pics of trees composited over random pics of starry skies", I wouldn't have a problem with it. I still wouldn't like the images, as the compositing is sub par at best, but that would just be my subjective appreciation. But at least she wouldn't be lying.

I think the point is that she probably had some sub-par photos even after editing it, and had to make up some story about "adventures" and "efforts" to get these.

I don't have problem with images composited from two taken on different places, don't have problem with edited ones, as long as this is stated. The problem is, when one says this is came out from the camera like this.

> Also, I'm unclear on what the circles in the last pictures indicate. Particularly the green one.

The green circle is meant to point the reader to an area of the picture showcasing a problem written about in the article:

"What can also be striking to anyone familiar with astronomy or astrophotography is that there is no atmospheric effect as you get closer to the horizon (you usually see a darker and more colorful layer on the horizon). It’s a natural effect that is always present no matter where on the planet you take a picture from. It’s another piece of evidence suggesting that once again the sky has been quite heavily messed with."

The only place these images belong is in the trash.

The third option to your "either" is that the editors at NatGeo are telling porkies.

Nobody makes mistakes or cheats anymore. It's always somebody else's fault.

"I am not passing the blame on to her". But it's all the intern's fault!

Busted. If these photos on Flickr, she'll probably get a million views. Is NG becoming like all those other photo sharing sites -- nice photos, but Photoshopped like crazy.

I just don't understand how National Geographic has been quiet about this. It seems pretty evident that the skies were manipulated, sometimes changing hemispheres. How is that Adrien can so eloquently point this out, and still NG thinks that the skies are real. They simply can't be, and therefore these pics don't belong on NG. And while Beth Moon takes responsibility, she really needs to do better. I can't even imagine she thought these were the same images that she took on location. Is she that unaware of what her images look like?

Maybe she didn't take the photos. Maybe she farmed out the onsite work then gave an intern a single copy of a MW photo she took sometime and said "here, stitch these panos together and toss in this MW sky and make it pop. I got a book deadline coming up and need some pizzaz."

That sounds about right. She didn't feel like sitting on location night after night to get just the right star scene. So she clicked on some Royalty Free Milky Way photos and got her pay check.

It looks like NG has removed the story from FB and from its website. But still, no word from NG that I can find.

I saved it on the wayback machine, just in case
https://web.archive.org/web...

What happened to the photos in the article?

I don't think the wayback machine can save photos. At least it got the story, I guess that's better than nothing. If anyone knows how to save the photos on wayback machine, please let me know.