The claim in the American Moon documentary is that some of the photos show that they were taken in a studio with spotlights, and by extension on earth in a studio, because of the way the light falls off in the photos. The premise being that, given how far away the sun is, the entire landscape of the moon should be equally lit."From the documentary, "when the sun illuminates a large a large flat expanse, the light reaches every visible point with the same intensity. Whether we observers an area closer to us or in the distance the luminosity of the ground is practically the same everywhere"Example from the documentary:One example of light falloff from the Apollo photos is as11_40_5875.jpg shown here:An illustration of what they mean from the documentary:So they claim that the light should evenly covering the landscape as shown in this example here:Does anyone know how to explain the light falloff in these moon photos?They do address common suggestions like heiligenschein which is a spotlight effect that happens when the sun is directly behind the photographer. But as they put it in the documentary, "But many of the photos show the hotspot effects when light is at the side and not behind photographers head". Which is true.My gut reaction is there are varying things going on and one explanation will not cover all the pictures with this falloff effect.One tack I took was finding photos that do have the moon's landscape evenly lit. For example AS11-39-5741HR below. You can also see a bit of heiligenschein around the shadow of the LM as the light is coming from the rear. However, the light does also evenly cover the entire surface. My thinking is how would this be possible of not taken on the moon? While it doesn't explain the pictures with light falloff it does make it probable that are anomalous, given that we have photos clearly taken from the moon.But what I would really like are some good explanations of how we get light falloff. There are several examples given in the documentary so lets start with as11_40_5875.I do have the relevant section of the documentary edited and uploaded if anyone cares to see the whole thing.Thanks