Quote: and once captured, an image no longer reflects current reality anyway.
Oooh, deep stuff, special relativity, Mach cones etc. In fact it doesn't even do that, the light that formed the image was recording a reality that already no longer exists by the time it reaches the camera!
But isn't the essence of a photograph that it captures a two-dimensional map of the smoothed average of whatever portion of the real Universe was seen by the camera lens during the exposure?