As an amateur photographer the reporting at the beginning of the pandemic was journalistic poison. Anyone even vaguely interested in photography knows about lens compression. There wasn't a single photo of a beach or a high-street I could find that wasn't intentionally composed to compress the crowds.
I'm not sure this was contrary to what the parent comment says. Back in April the newspapers and other media were regularly using photographs that made crowds and beaches look much more densly packed than they were.
This was being pointed out by articles like the one you linked to, but that doesn't negate original offense. Far fewer people were reading articles like this than were seing toxic scare-mongering photos on the front pages of major national newspapers.
It depends where you are I imagine. Some countries have cultures where any attempts to lessen the messaging in coronavirus news is on par with being morally wrong (or even dangerous). Other cultures are more critical or resistant. HN has a very diverse mix of users from a range of places.
Perspective distortion misuse was neither of these though. It was simply dishonest journalism which distorted the messaging everywhere: are people following lockdowns and distancing or not? How does this relate to case numbers? Who could know because the pictures being put out there meant nothing.
"Misuse" is something of a judgment call though. Pretty much any photo makes choices of perspective, framing, etc. There are certainly cases of clear distortion but, especially in the context of distancing, arbitrary photos--even with "'normal"-ish focal lengths can tell very different stories depending upon where the camera is pointed.
If you're standing 100 feet away to use a movie-magic trick to make two objects seem next to each other when they're very much not, you're (edit: probably) being dishonest.
edit: when that standing next to each other is attempting to introduce a narrative that people are doing something contrary to what they're actually doing
I’m not particularly into photography so I would probably have never heard of that effect if it were not for HN. That’s why I keep coming back here, I always find something interesting!
A 300mm telephoto lens gives a narrower field of view than the standard eyeball, making objects in the field of view seem packed closer together. A 24mm wide-angle lens gives a wider field of view, making objects in the field of view seem farther apart. ("Objects in mirror are closer than they appear"? Yeah, same thing.) Both can be used for artistic effects as well as being dishonest. (I really like a 150-200mm lens for portraits; for one thing not having the camera and photographer nearby makes people look more natural.) A good match for the eye is a 50mm "standard" lens. (All lens sizes are for 35mm cameras; I don't remember what the correction factor is for my DSLR's CCD.)
1.5x if it’s an APS-C sensor, 2x if it’s a micro 4/3rds, and 1x if it’s full frame (this is most likely if you’re shooting Nikon or Canon, Fujifilm mirror-less are APS-C, Panasonic et al are m4/3)
The relative sizes depend on the relative distance from the camera. Say you have two persons, one standing one meter in front of the other, and the photographer standing one meter in front of the frontmost person, shooting with a wide-angle lens so that the nearest person fills the frame. The far person is then twice as far away as the near person (2m vs. 1m), and will appear half the size of the near person (assuming they're the same size in reality!). The photographer then moves 50 meters away, and shoots with a (really!) long telephoto lens, so that the nearest person still fills the frame. The near person is now 50 meters away and the far person is 51 meters away, and will appear 50/51 of the near persons's size.
(This would still happen if the photographer kept the wide-angle lens, but then a lot more of the surroundings would have been included in the frame, making it obvious that the persons were far away. Whether tele/wide-angle "affects perspective" is a favourite topic of endless debate on photo-related Internet forums. The answer hinges on which parameters you maintain constant, and which ones you allow to vary.)
> journalistic poison ... intentionally composed to compress the crowds
The article addresses and explores this viewpoint and attempts to add nuance.
> If you search for "compression effect corona" in Japanese on the internet, you'll discover a flood of criticism of newspaper and television images related to the pandemic, including allegations of "creating crowding," "lies," and "faked shots." [...]
> The photos were lambasted as "exaggerating" the crowding, "manipulative," and "stoking public anxiety." However, there is no proof that the photographer was deliberately seeking to create a distorted impression of the scene.
> Shooting crowds with a telephoto lens is standard procedure among photojournalists. I had never questioned the practice, because I thought it was intended to express crowdedness. And as far as I am aware, there had never been criticism of the technique before the pandemic. [...]
> I don't think us news photographers can keep using techniques we'd always taken for granted without talking about why we use them. We are in a time when we must try to shoot our subjects from multiple angles, and explain the effects lens compression and exaggerated perspective can have.
Using telephoto lenses and angles that preclude the audience from understanding distances between people in a crowd without knowing the specifications of photography equipment is absolutely fine for artistic effect, but in documentary shots IMO it treads the line next to bad (regardless of the times) journalism, especially if another composition that allows the viewer to approximate crowd density objectively is possible.
To clarify, the blame does not lie entirely with the photojournalist. They may choose to get a shot using a telephoto lens to capture, say, which face expressions dominate the crowd (which may be unfeasible with a wide lens).
Now, if this is the only picture the photographer has taken, then both the editor (who had not had a lot of options, though still could go without a photo entirely) and the photographer are guilty of contributing unprofessional journalism.
On the other hand, if the editor chose to use only the tele shot while having other angles available, then the editor is culpable (the photographer, only in so much as they do not raise a concern and choose to continue to work with that editor).
> However, there is no proof that the photographer was deliberately seeking to create a distorted impression of the scene.
How could there be? Do you expect the photographer to outright admit that intent? Short of such an admission, what would proof of the photographers' intent look like?
I suspect it's unfair to blame the photographers on the ground directly for this. Often photographers will take a number of shots from different angles and at different focal lengths and at different moments. At least in some publications after that they will have then had only very limited input into which images got used (or whether their images or someone else's were used).
In these cases it is/was an editorial decision. If editorial staff had multiple images to choose from like this then it's hard to see a decision to use the most crowded-looking photos (which it's pretty hard to argue isn't what happened) as a completely innocent one.
Yes, if the subject of the story is "overcrowding at popular park despite coronavirus" it is intensely dishonest to exclusively use shots taken with long lenses.
that was incredibly depressing to me. I think the manipulating of perspective when trying to make the fish you caught look bigger is harmless enough but manipulating perspective to push a political agenda is harmful and depressing. Any photo i see on a news outlet i now have to tease out what manipulations may exist.
I suspect the illusion comes from assuming the picure is realistic, in the sense that there is a place where one could stand and perceive the scene as depicted.
In my experience, which is limited to phone cameras and the like, they seem to produce realistic images at short ranges, but a landscape picture looks much smaller and more distant than how the scene seems to me as I take it, unless I zoom in. That has me wondering if there is some geometry that would give realistic-looking pictures at all distances? Perhaps if the camera is sized such that the lens-to-sensor distance is about the same as the eye-to-picture distance when viewing the images?
Another issue that I am wondering about comes from the fact that telescopes (and, I am assuming, telescopic lenses for photography) have an objective lens to produce an image that is much closer, and then an eyepiece (or whatever the equivalent is called in photography) to view that image. Does this have different perspective and foreshortening effects than a simple lens which merely casts an image directly on the sensor plane? To put it another way, for a given telescopic lens, is there, at least conceptually, an equivalent simple lens which would produce an identical image of any scene?
> In my experience, which is limited to phone cameras and the like, they seem to produce realistic images at short ranges, but a landscape picture looks much smaller and more distant than how the scene seems to me as I take it, unless I zoom in. That has me wondering if there is some geometry that would give realistic-looking pictures at all distances? Perhaps if the camera is sized such that the lens-to-sensor distance is about the same as the eye-to-picture distance when viewing the images?
If you have access to camera with a manual hardware zoom, put it up to your right eye, keep your left eye open. Adjust the zoom on the camera until what you see with your right and lines up with what you see with your left.
That’s the perspective that you see at. Do this with a few friends and you’ll find out that you all see at slightly different “zoom levels,” meaning there can’t be an out of the box universal “eyesight lens.”
Telescopes etc are already designed to give the same perspective and foreshortening effects as a "simple" lens or a pinhole camera. There can be some imperfections (e.g. "barrel distortions"), but these are pretty small. Compared to a single lens, a fancy telephoto lens captures more light (producing a brighter image), it may blur the out-of-focus part of the picture more, and it has less chromatic aberration, but the perspective projection is the same.
The perspective distortion comes for landscape photos are due to the field of view. So the absolute distance between lens and sensor doesn't matter, what matters is the ratio between that distance and the width of the sensor. As long as that ratio is the same as the ratio of the eye-to-picture distance and width of the picture, the perspectives will match.
The problem is that if you are looking at a landscape with your bare eyes, you will look at a quite large field of view. To reproduce that field of view when looking at the picture, you probably need to print it several meters wide, and look at it from a meter away or so. If you take a photo with the same field of view but print it at a handheld size, it will look "too small" and the perspective will seem exaggerated.
I use cameras practically and can’t quote the theory, but my understanding is as follows:
> That has me wondering if there is some geometry that would give realistic-looking pictures at all distances?
I don’t think so. Compared with wider angle lenses as in phones, camera telephoto lenses produce the compression effect when the nearer and further objects are relatively close to each other compared with their common distance to the camera. If you had three people at 5, 100 and 105 metres away the 5m one would probably be out of focus and look significantly larger than the two at 100 and 105m. A zoom lens allows the degree of compression to be changed, but the image changes as you zoom.
> Another issue that I am wondering about comes from the fact that telescopes (and, I am assuming, telescopic lenses for photography) have an objective lens to produce an image that is much closer, and then an eyepiece (or whatever the equivalent is called in photography) to view that image.
Cameras don’t have an eyepiece lens in the same way that telescopes and microscopes do. In DSLRs, there is a mirror that routes the light to the camera viewfinder. When a picture is taken, the mirror moves out of the way and the light from the lens directly hits the sensor. In mirrorless digital cameras, the viewfinder image is created electronically rather than optically from the sensor.
Most serious camera 'lenses' in fact have multiple elements. By way of example, a Nikon 20-200 lens has the following: 21 elements in 18 groups (including 6 ED lens elements, 2 aspherical elements, 1 fluorite element, 1 SR lens element, elements with Nano Crystal and ARNEO coats, and a fluorine-coated front lens element) [0]
It is certainly true that a camera does not have the equivalent of a telescope's eyepiece lens (at least when capturing the picture), but I think one could say that in a telescope, the combination of eyepiece lens and the lens of the viewer's eye functions in the same way as a camera, by casting a real image on the sensor (the retina, in this case.)
> In my experience, which is limited to phone cameras and the like, they seem to produce realistic images at short ranges, but a landscape picture looks much smaller and more distant than how the scene seems to me as I take it, unless I zoom in.
That's another issue, not caused by different lens or physics but by how our brains interprets what it sees. Our brains pick up and zoom on details subconsciously (and "compress" the uninteresting background) so you remember the details "bigger" than they are in reality.
That's why medieval cities on paintings have often towers twice the height compared to a photo of the same view. Same thing happens when you look at the Moon and then make a photo of it (without zooming). You have to zoom 2 or 3 times before it looks as big as "in reality".
This is the kind of "technically correct" that is "usefully wrong".
The concept of "lens compression" is understood to include composing the subject to the same apparent size with the different lenses. Yes, of course standing in one place and compositing multiple telephoto shots will create the same image as a single wide angle shot. That's not how people shoot. You're not going to compose a 3/4ths portrait shot with a telephoto, swap lenses, and just stand there. You're going to walk in on the subject and recompose to a 3/4ths portrait.
The problem is, people do misunderstand it, especially more artistic photographers, who are not as engineering minded as people here. Many actually think it is some kind of lens distortion, comparable to radial distortion or some kind of artifact or noise caused by the lens doing some lens magic. But the same effect persists with a pinhole camera too, the lens is a red herring. Not technically but fundamentally.
If you switch to a lens with higher magnification, that's an indirect reason. It may or may not make you move farther away. But the distortion/appearance is due to the distance.
Also, you may crop photos (ie digital zoom) or use a different sensor size or sensor distance.
At the end of the day, the necessary and sufficient condition for the change in appearance is the distance.the lens is neither sufficient nor necessary.
Yes, lens compression is how people colloquially know a variety of perspective distortion (foreshortening). I have a background in optics and there is quite a bit of lingo discontinuity.
I always find the running scene in The Graduate a great illustration of this effect. He is running flat out what feels like an age and yet barely seems to get any closer to the camera.
Another really good example are amateur videos taken of airliners landing in crosswinds. Usually taken head-on, they are necessarily taken from a very long distance, so it looks like the plane just hovers as it gently drops to the ground.
In this scene (if I remember correctly) the man on the right is coolly allowing the man on the left to believe that he's being threatened with being sent (by the approaching airplane) to another country where he would suffer a terrible fate.
The scene is meant to make it look like the airplane pilot has deliberately executed an impressive landing right next to the men, but apparently in real life it was quite far away (like a runway's length or so).
Indeed. Typical "correlation is not causation" phenomenon.
Compression is caused by distance; not by your lens. But telephoto lenses are usually used when you're far away from your subject.
Another example is "we use AC power on the grid because it's more efficient than DC for transmission." Nope. High voltage is more efficient for transmission; we use AC only because Thomas Edison didn't have silicon carbide power transistors.
Theory aside, in a pandemic, the longer lens is more conducive to social distancing. Its use may be simply a matter of sound hygiene and not editorial stance.
For a journalist, a long focal length may be the most practical way to get a shot. Nick Ut carries a DSLR with a 60-600mm in addition to his Leica these days.
Some of the most-impactful photojournalism images are made with focal lengths between 24 and 50 mm. To fill the frame with your subject requires being well within their personal space.
70 mm and higher really allows a lot of distance. The pandemic has definitely changed things, at least temporarily.
It's interesting because psychologically it really has an effect.
I find myself feeling uncomfortable at how close people are when watching Netflix shows. My conscious mind knows it's nothing, but I had to stop and think why I was feeling uncomfortable at the lack of "personal space". I paused to ask my wife about it and she felt the same.
We've got this new mental norm and intentional or not, what we see and witness is affecting us.
I'm in London and personal space has rarely been something you worry about here, crowded tubes with a shorter persons nose in my arm pit was not unusual before the pandemic.
These days just seeing people at less than arms length apart is enough to make me uncomfortable enough to need to wonder why.
I have no doubt plenty of media sensationalise but I'm not "pro" enough of a photographer to determine if this is intentional or if photographers in the media are just ignorant of the issue.
I live in a part of the world that has stamped out the virus, and it has taken a while to fade the anxieties surrounding crowds and public amenities and such that I built up during the middle of it. It's a combination of so many things, but I have somewhat crested the hill and feel comfortable in public spaces again. It's obviously not over yet, we're not inoculated and it could get re-introduced. But I can be pretty confident with the situation right now.
The biggest issue is just the factor of the unknown. It was never clear what's right, what's overreacting, what's underreacting, am I doing too much am I doing too little? Someone sniffs down the hall and your imagination goes wild...
But we know so much more about it, and what protections are in place, that a lot of that anxiety of the unknown is gone. I have personally learned about myself, what my comfortable levels of risk are, and I have seen how my country responds to outbreaks and it has filled me with great confidence.
To everyone still amidst the pandemic, know that you're carrying some extra cognitive load even if you're being totally reasonable about everything. So don't feel bad if you're feeling worn out, and I hope we'll all be on the end of it soon enough.
If it goes on for another year or two (pls don't kill the messenger, remember last Feb-March and how we just had to flatten the curve for some weeks or a month, vaccines will take way longer than the media pushes) it will also significantly impact small children and their assessment of how the world works, social norms, dangers of strangers, masks covering expressive faces, less contact to extended family etc.
I'll be curious to see how the effect on kids plays out. Are there kids who are better off with distance learning because it got them away from schoolyard bullies? Will most kids now be more understanding of other kids who were isolates before, knowing now what isolation feels like? How will this affect the fads of the 2030s as these kids come of age?
Any serious photographer understands quite well how to use photographs to sell a particular story. And I have no doubt that more than one photographer has been sent out by an editor with instructions to shoot some photos of people crowding together.
It's also true that if a photographer is out to get photos of people, they're not going to shoot a picture of an empty street.
It's going to be so interesting when this is over, all the strange habits we will have made and will have a hard time to let go of.
It also gives me pause to think that some people will never recover (bordering on mental illness), some people will forever be afraid of physical closeness to others after going through this.
Absolutely, I wonder when/if not wearing masks will be totally normal again. How will it affect the next generation?
My daughter isn't much older than this pandemic, and she's been used to seeing people with face masks on her whole life; one of her first words is "mask". She's had to struggle her way through her first year not being able to use all of the usual visual cues we are used to seeing in peoples faces, but has done so without a hiccup that I can see, it's just normal to her.
I don't think the psychological effect will last very long among most of the population, based on two observations. One is that whenever lockdowns have been lifted in Europe, restaurants and pubs swiftly went back to being packed – and even now some restaurants in e.g. Italy and Poland are defying the restrictions and reopening, and still getting queues of people waiting to enter.
And not only does concern among younger generations about the virus vary widely, but many touristic locales that attract crowds of elderly people, the predominant risk group for COVID, were just as crowded in summer 2020 as any other year, with little regard for distancing.
I've no idea why you were being downvoted, I think that there will be some lingering habits that may take a while to dissipate, but I think a lot of people are depesperate to get back to something resembling normality.
Frankly as soon as it's genuinly safe to do so (who knows when that will be) I'll be having people round and visiting people all the time.
There's some subset of people who think that any talk of going back to normal (even as a future thing) is premature, actively dangerous, and probably associated with right-wing politics.
The photos in that article are equally as bad as the effect being described, as not taken at the same time, with the same numbers of people in shot. So it is hard to compare and gives a biased view.
Definitely valid points being made, but not having directly comparable photographs weakens the argument, to me. I'd rather see shots of the same crowds and locations for direct comparison, which would make the explanations more clear.
The Japanese photos I think one could reasonably say "I don't care what lens they're using that's still a lot of people." Whereas those photos, there's a clearly well-spaced out line that the head-on telephoto shot makes look like a mob.
It's especially egregious in the Showa Kinen Park photos. Unless lenses can make people disappear, there are people along the right side of the path in the first of those photos and none on the right side in the second.
They really should have had a second photographer and then one takes a photo with the 28mm and one with the 300mm at the same time and in roughly the same place.
The first was shot with a 400mm lens; looking at the second (the 28mm shot), you can see a grouping of people across the width of the path in the distance. It's possible that the shots were taken roughly at the same time and location, minutes a few seconds, depending on whether the photographer had to swap lenses. That said, it's not a very useful example when it comes to demonstrating the effect, and the framing with the rows of trees converging make it even worse.
There's a link higher in the discussion[0] I think better demonstrates how differences in perspective and the distance between subject and background can distort how we perceive an image than photos taken in the same spot. There are two photos of the same socially-distanced line, one taken with a telephoto lens looking down the line and another that was taken with a wider lens from the side.
The change in camera position makes the difference incredibly obvious, even more so than two photos shot from the same location.
What's unfortunate is that the first photo in the link, with the people's faces laid out across the frame diagonally, is the more aesthetically pleasing photo and also the more likely one for a photojournalist to shoot. It showcases more of the people present, highlights the emotions at play amongst the people in line, places them in a vibrant and moving city context, and pulls the viewer's eye along a specific path. Ask a photojournalist, and it's basically the framing that comes to mind when they think "people standing in line on a sidewalk." And there's no question which of the two an editor would choose in pre-pandemic times.
But given the social distancing taking place in the line, it's also significantly less faithful to the actual moment being captured. And that goes against everything an ethical photojournalist strives for.
Your link is much better at demonstrating what they want to in the top level link.
Showa Kinen is clearly two different areas. Or if the telephoto lens is the area in the background, it's zoomed in to a degree that makes it not really the same area being pictured.
Whereas in yours, they have easily identifiable people and landmarks so you can tell they're the same place and that not much has moved.
Credit where it's due: my link was posted by phreeza at the top of this discussion.
Anyhow, you're right: the difference between a 28mm focal length and a 400mm one is...extreme. Here's a set of images (just a landscape; not COVID-related) showing different focal lengths[0] in action that illustrates just how much so, taken from the same location.
I'm pretty confident it's the same area in the Showa Kinen photos the more I look at them, but that just illustrates how unhelpful an example the chosen images actually were. The huge difference is focal length is effectively the same as shooting an entirely different scene. It's not a good example, but it may have just been the only one the editor had available at the time.
I don't think it does make the point, as they are depicting different crowds (or different parts of the same crowd) that differ objectively in their density. The claim, on the other hand (and which, in general, I agree with), is that you can manipulate the apparent density of the same crowd.
Indeed, and in addition, the convergence of lines seems to suggest that they are taken from different hights (the first from above adult head height, and the second from below it.) In the first case, this seems to fill the frame with people.
There's an interesting related effect where zooming drastically changes perceived speeds. Here's a video from optical illusion researcher Kitaoka, where a train appears to be rushing along or crawling, depending on the zoom:
https://twitter.com/akiyoshikitaoka/status/12246910321738424...
I mean, it's pretty clear that the change in perceived speed is because of the lower "screen space" velocity of features at the edges - The more you zoom, the closer to the vanishing point the edges of the video are, and thus the slower the pixels 'move' outward.
Well this article is couched in terms of the pandemic. It would be interesting to see some studies to tease out political biase media outlits during election season. Does the size of a crowd influence the perception of popularity?
Same for protests. Watch them on the news vs. the twitch streamers. looks like a war zone at 6PM but at 2:30 AM it looks like a few people in an intersection.
People are extremely bad at estimating how many people there are in crowds (respectively in pictures of crowds). Traditional media (newspapers, TV, etc.) tend to be pretty honest about it from my experience but on social medias pictures of protests are almost always instrumented to make it appear as though something had way more support than it actually has.
And I'm not talking about sligh misjugdments, I'm talking being off by one order of magnitude.
In your typical picture of a protest taken with a smartphone from a high-rise building there is at most 5 to 10k people in the shot. Yet you'll often find such pictures on social medias labeled "100s of thousands in the street protesting for [whatever]".
And for someone who's not particularily paying attention it's easy to be manipulated because we really have no frame of reference for what thousands of people look like, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands.
Sure you can make things look crowded with a telephoto lens but that first picture is Takeshita Street in Harajuku and it IS crowded.
I haven't been down there in a while but here's October 31st 2020. If I'd had known it was going to be that crowded I wouldn't have gone. Was just out for a walk.
One of my lessons learned from 2020 is that, while a picture may still be worth 1000 words, those words are not inherently more or less unbiased than the printed word.
Anything to do with crowds is particularly susceptible to photographic interpretation, deliberately done or otherwise. And the tendency, unless the photographer is deliberately trying to make a crowd look sparse is probably to show a lot of people because that generally makes for a more interesting photograph if the crowd is in some sense the story.
There's a similar even more dramatic effect if you go to the top of a tower and look out over totally flat countryside: in the distance it looks like dense woodland, although the trees are hundreds of metres apart in reality.
My take: Photojournalism is better considered as science than art.
Readers would be better served if photogs showed their work. eg: Documenting the shot, showing the shooting area; making that available to readers as reference.
The discussion on the editorial decisions a photog makes has gotten so technical that they are now no longer allowed to shoot in RAW. They are only allowed to submit camera orginal JPEG images. The newsies are so afraid of any "manipulation" comments that they do not allow changing the exposure or developing the RAW image in "post".
That seems weird because JPEGs are processed but in the camera based on parameters that the photographer programs. But I guess the thinking would be that those parameters are mostly fairly limited and JPEG means you don't have to do post-processing as in the case of raw images (which are also processed in the camera but to a more limited degree).
This rule came about out of fear of claims images were manipulated/doctored. By processing a RAW image, you are manipulating the image in post (even if just for developing purposes only. No compositing/editing.) If you never have to do any post processing, then there is very little chance of any "shenanigans" of compositing something into or out of the image. The image is exactly the way the camera saw it.
I was with you until that sentence. Certainly things like color temperature can be changed which can affect the mood of the photo. But I take the basic point. So long as you're not doing processing in post, there's not a lot of opportunity to remove objects and the like.
I would not be surprised to the photogs revolting by just running everything in full auto. Frame it, and shoot it. No more thinking after the framing decisions. Nice and easy, give me my cheesy.
There are other reasons as well. It provides a backup in case of a memory card failure. I also sometimes shoot events where I like to have raw photos but I need to pass off JPEGs to editors to use right away. JPEGs are also quicker/easier to work with in general but it's nice to have the raw photos for some images that you want to have some more latitude to work with at length.
If you do political rallies, it is a matter of time until there is a picture of one of your people talking to what looks like an empty space in the newspaper.
I have been flagging this whenever and wherever I see otherwise reasonable people freaking out about it on Twitter for a YEAR now.
For the entire pandemic it has been a favoured plank of the "blame the population, not the government" policy of the UK Government and its client press. i.e. The Government's policies are flawless; it is non-compliance, particularly amongst groups of people the right wing press consider the enemy, which is causing all the deaths.
'It is your duty,' the Government says, 'to go out and remain fit to reduce the pressure on the NHS. But stay X meters away from people!' So the population does this, by-and-large entirely to spec., then they are crucified by the press. The photographers taking the pictures know about the foreshortening effect, the publishers know, and they run their awful headlines anyway. It is shameful and beyond depressing that it is so effective.
I used to have a 300mm Nikon lens and if I would stand a couple feet away from my bamboo blind while it was closed (it had some little gaps), I could focus on an object about 100ft away on the other side and you could not see the blind... like it became invisible (I could not even see the object with my bar eyes).
There is no such effect. Telephoto lenses do not compress. You could see the same perspective by taking the center part of an image shot with a normal lens, ie by cropping. This is easily verified.
Of course, but at a distance where the effect is noticable and the crop level required, you would be left with just a handful of pixels, so effectively, this is limited to high focal length lenses. And sice high enough focal lengths onyl come in telephoto lenses, this is basically limited to those.
Telephoto means long focal length. (Long not “high”).
It’s not true that only a handful of pixels would be left with a modern sensor.
The point is that perspective is a result of distance from the subject or subjects. Long lenses make it convenient to work from further away without having to crop later, but the key thing is distance. If you shoot portraits from too close they will look bad regardless of lens and later cropping. If you shoot a crowd from close up, that intimacy is baked into the pictures.
No, it doesn't. Telephoto is a specific category of long-focal lenses, where the focal length is longer than the lens itself - that is achieved using a special lens element that isn't present in regular long lenses. (as for the "high focal length", I guess it's just a language quirk as it makes perfect sense in my native language)
Looking at the math, cropping a picture taken with a 28mm lens to the equivalent of 300mm is a crop factor of 0.093. Using the highest-res camera I've used (a Sony A7R IV) at 61MP, this results in a photo of around 900x600 pixels - not something you'd ever see published and taking into account the significant amount of noise that is unavoidable at that pixel density, the photo would be utterly unusable even at that resolution.
So sure, it's a distance effect, but since no sane person would do that kind of crop and if they did, it would be painfully obvious or at least highly suspicious-looking to most people (also keep in mind the DoF!), it's pretty safe to conclude that this effect will be significant only with telephoto lenses.
Any long lens you buy is going to use the telephoto design, it's a given. A fairly mild crop to say make a 85mm simulate a 105mm is almost undetectable in terms of quality, and the difference that can make to the look of a portrait because you took a few steps further back and then cropped to get the same framing as a 105mm, is very noticeable.
You need much more than a 20mm difference to make social-distancing people look like they're basically hugging, which is what the article is about. Either way, none of this matters anyways because the whole point of the article is the compression effect, not where it comes from and in their case, it came from a telephoto lens, not a cropped wide-angle, so the terminology is entirely fine.
Consider the angle formed by the left side of the picture, the camera/viewer, and the right side of the picture. The higher the zoom (or the crop), the smaller this angle is. It's called field of view (FOV).
You've seen this in horror movies when they pull the camera back while zooming in (or out). The protagonist fills the same amount of the screen while their face distorts and the angle spanned by the background narrows (or expands). The fireplace in the background that originally was a small part of the background now spans the whole background. Or the crowd. https://filmschoolrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Jaw... That's the kind of distortion under discussion.
You're right that zooming and cropping are the same, but that doesn't actually refute the point, because both affect FOV the same way, and FOV differences are the topic under discussion.
You are actually making my point for me. The perspective change you are talking about is called "a dolly zoom". A dolly is a little cart that runs on a track, so the camera can be physically moved in a straight line, in this case moving towards or away from the subject. The change in perspective is caused by this change in distance, made more noticeable because the zoom lens continually changes focal length to keep the subject the same size. It forces us to see the effect distance has, something our eyes normally tunes out.
It’s really not. The lens is not the key thing it’s the distance from the subject. There is no flattening effect. Amateurs typically plant their feet and use variable focal length lenses to frame the shot, and are missing out on the perspective control you get from using your feet.
But the only type of lens you could use to get a reasonable resolution at the distance required is a telephoto lens, hence distinction without a difference.
Just shoot everything in 20mm, because that is roughly equivalent to the human eye. Mark every photo with a different lens as distorted and potentially misleading. Journalistic integrity saved ;)
There is no equivalent focal length to the human eye.
It depends on what you are doing with the eye. For example, when you are focusing on a single thing, like a person talking to you, then a picture with a 50 mm (135) lens generally looks sorta similar in terms of proportions and perceived perspective. But if you are taking in the scenery, a 50 mm lens would seem to be too narrow and you need a moderate wide angle to convey a similar feel. Similarly, intently focusing on a distant object will make a 50 mm seem to broad, and a 105 mm will seem more like it.
Yeah, 50mm was the traditional full-frame 35mm film "normal" lens but anything from about 35mm focal length to 100mm or so would be pretty conventional. You get wider or longer than that and you're getting into different perspectives than what a human eye would normally see. But, as you say, it's not really a straightforward comparison.
Viewfinders are also usually designed to have around 1x magnification with a 50 mm lens. That's why the viewfinders on crop DSLRs seem smaller than on a fullframe, because they literally are 2/3rds the size.
...not least because you have that lump inside your head that does a fair bit of processing on what your eye reports to your brain and constructs something we think of as seeing but isn't actually what is sensed by the eye.
That doesn't matter if the panorama is stitched using the same projection as the lens (i.e. rectilinear panorama for a rectilinear lens, or a fisheye pano for a fisheye lens), because projection and field of view are the same, so the images are the same.
Note that professionally made panoramas are often made with more complicated and hand-tuned projections like Panini.
> You really need to know the sensor size to adjust accordingly.
Absolutely. Focus length without sensor size (or film size) is a meaningless indicator for FOV.
But when it comes to a FOV being equivalent to the human eye, surely we should take display size into account as well. A photo made with a 500mm lens displayed at 4"x6" has exactly the same perspective as a photo taken from the same place with a 50m lens, displayed at 40"x60". In fact that small picture is basically the same as the large one cropped to the size of the small one.
It's a factor I never see mentioned. The usual explanation is that a "normal" lens gives more or less the same image when we look through the viewfinder as when we look directly, without the camera. But we don't look at photographs through a camera's viewfinder; we see them on our screens, on billboards, on prints.
Then you can go all the way and factor in viewing distance as well, then with the physical dimensions of the medium and the viewing distance you get an actual FOV, which better to be in the same order of magnitude as the FOV of the camera when the picture was taken to look realistic.
Then again, it's also weird to try and guess what an average perspective would even be, as it's dependent on screen size and distance from face. I wonder how consistent the "arc-length" is between people and devices
~40mm isn't that unusual. I have a 40mm pancake lens for my full-frame DSLR and I've had rangefinders with about that fixed focal length and it was pretty common as the low-end of a lot of digital point and shoots.
Certainly. Before zooms became common, 50mm was absolutely the standard "kit" lens for an SLR. Personally, I always preferred something a bit wider for day-to-day. Of course, most people generally use zooms these days.
With no crop factor, 50mm is pretty close to what's "in frame" for me, with my glasses, and 35mm is pretty close to what's "in frame" for my total field of vision. You'd have to defocus pretty hard to make a 35mm lens match what my uncorrected eyes actually see, though...
This conversion doesn't actually make any technical sense. Yes, you can calculate the field of view, but the depth of field, the angles of sight lines etc. are that of a 35mm lens.
For an intuitive way to visualize this: look at a few dolly zooms and think about what you are seeing in terms of geometry.
There is no single lens length that can capture all types of phenomena that journalism is interested in.
And a single lens length does not solve a problem. What if you wait for people to leave a bus and capture at exact moment when they are out of the bus but haven't had time to disperse yet? What if you cut the bus out of the shot and extend it to the street.
Your idea is naive in the extreme in that it would solve anything.
> Two photos taken from the same spot show Tokyo's Harajuku district on Jan. 21, 2021. [...] In the left image, the distance between the people is obvious, but that sense of perspective is weak in the right image.
That is true, and it concerns appearance.
Let's talk about facts: in both photos, there are just too many people around. In Covid times, you stay at home.
Lens compression only works if too many people are there to begin with. If people are sparse enough, no picture will make you worry.
Take the two examples in the article: the picture with the trees, when compressed, looks less dense than the non-compressed picture in the street. Guess which scenario is safer!
