28 ms·

Telephoto fear: how lenses affect views of crowds

304 points by _cs2017_ 6y ago

reedf1 6y ago
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.
- phreeza 6y ago
  On the contrary, I explicitly remember this effect making the rounds in many outlets in April: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-paa-hinanden-disse-billeder-er-taget-samtidig-men-viser-to https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-...
  - thinkingemote 6y ago
    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.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      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.
      - thinkingemote 6y ago
        Yes we agree with each other.
      - gabriel34 6y ago
        This may, in fact, backfire in a couple of ways: 1. It may reduce societal pressure to isolate by making it seem only a minority of people are actually doing it (much like the broken windows theory) 2. It fuels distrust in media outlets. Deservingly so, even if machiavellianly this choice seems to serve the greater good.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - ghaff 6y ago
        "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.
        t-writescode 6y ago
        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
  - ornornor 6y ago
    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!
    - mcguire 6y ago
      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.)
      - girvo 6y ago
        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)
      - pottertheotter 6y ago
        How is it that people's heads look the same size when they can be so far apart? I guess I need to learn more about all this.
        Pinus 6y ago
        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.)
  - noneeeed 6y ago
    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.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    This article has way better examples than OP. Thanks for sharing!
  - handedness 6y ago
    The poisonous journalistic atmosphere which the GP referenced was precisely the impetus behind that much-needed exercise.
    - trhway 6y ago
      Damaging the trust in media and government is a classic "penny smart, pound foolish", and the next time the boy cries wolf things may go differently.
      - MichaelZuo 6y ago
        The media industry seems to be trapped in an enormous sub optimal Nash equilibrium.
        throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        Quarterly earnings are built on eyeball-hours so everyone is optimizing for short term maximization of eyeball hours.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Anyone even vaguely interested in photography knows about lens compression. And here I thought lens compression doesn't exist: https://fstoppers.com/originals/lens-compression-doesnt-exist-147615 https://fstoppers.com/originals/lens-compression-doesnt-exis...
  - reedf1 6y ago
    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.
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      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. The last 30 seconds of this clip https://youtu.be/yRBNA27N0ts https://youtu.be/yRBNA27N0ts
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        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.
        schoen 6y ago
        I remember someone mentioning this example: https://vimeo.com/152514220 https://vimeo.com/152514220 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).
- re 6y ago
  > 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.
  - goblin89 6y ago
    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.
    - goblin89 6y ago
      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).
- chasd00 6y ago
  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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brudgers 6y ago
  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.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    >the longer lens is more conducive to social distancing Why, because you're liable to hit someone with it when you swing around if they don't give you some space?
    - ISL 6y ago
      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.
- m463 6y ago
  I think that's what photographers do. They pull out the formula menu. Most movies about city things show that shot - the people walking walking walking - moving up and down and never getting closer or further away. And movies in the country always have an aerial shot over the countryside showing trees and roads below, finally zooming in on the car driving.
corty 6y ago
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 ;)
- virtue3 6y ago
  on a 35mm camera (what used to be standard film) it's 50mm lens is roughly human eye FoV. You really need to know the sensor size to adjust accordingly.
  - julvo 6y ago
    That's right. Here's a handy chart with common sensor sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-frame_DSLR#/media/File:SensorSizes.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-frame_DSLR#/media/File:Se... E.g. on a Canon 450D (crop factor 1.6) the equivalent of a 50mm full frame lens is a 30mm lens
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    I've always heard it was 35mm. Weird. 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
    - dsego 6y ago
      35 is 50 on a cropped sensor. But I also feel like my vision is closer to 35mm full frame (23 aps-c).
      - throwanem 6y ago
        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...
      - 6y ago
pif 6y ago
> 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.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  If I can go out safely and I know I & others are respecting the rules, theres zero chance of me staying at home. Lens compression was absolutely making the general public look irresponsible.
  - pif 6y ago
    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!
    - another-dave 6y ago
      The linked Danish article in another comment has some good examples of people spaced safely apart but appearing crowded depending on the photo used — https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-paa-hinanden-disse-billeder-er-taget-samtidig-men-viser-to https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-... By sparse enough, do you mean more than 2 metres from each other (as per the guidance in most countries) or some other metric?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
rutthenut 6y ago
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.
- bena 6y ago
  Thank you. 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.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    > none on the right side in the second Look again. They're not close to the camera, sure, but they're still there off in the distance. Kinda demonstrates the author's point, really.
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      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.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    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.
  - 6y ago
PaulHoule 6y ago
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.
alias_neo 6y ago
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.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  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.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    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.
    - noneeeed 6y ago
      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.
verytrivial 6y ago
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.
FloatArtifact 6y ago
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?
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  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.
  - dd_roger 6y ago
    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.
bloak 6y ago
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.
Brendinooo 6y ago
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.
- ghaff 6y ago
  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.
w0mbat 6y ago
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.
- csours 6y ago
  That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
  - w0mbat 6y ago
    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.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      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.
- franga2000 6y ago
  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.
  - w0mbat 6y ago
    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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
greggman3 6y ago
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. https://photos.app.goo.gl/LKZKbsqTKxU4SN4y5 https://photos.app.goo.gl/LKZKbsqTKxU4SN4y5 I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar level of crowded this Sunday though I don't plan to walk over to find out.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  People do seem to be standing a reasonable distance apart though, given the numbers.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
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.
- dylan604 6y ago
  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".
  - ghaff 6y ago
    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).
    - dylan604 6y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        >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.
kens 6y ago
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/1224691032173842432 https://twitter.com/akiyoshikitaoka/status/12246910321738424...
- 10000truths 6y ago
  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.
Triv888 6y ago
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).

304 points by _cs2017_ 6y ago

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.

phreeza 6y ago
On the contrary, I explicitly remember this effect making the rounds in many outlets in April: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-paa-hinanden-disse-billeder-er-taget-samtidig-men-viser-to https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-...
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  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.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    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.
    - thinkingemote 6y ago
      Yes we agree with each other.
    - gabriel34 6y ago
      This may, in fact, backfire in a couple of ways: 1. It may reduce societal pressure to isolate by making it seem only a minority of people are actually doing it (much like the broken windows theory) 2. It fuels distrust in media outlets. Deservingly so, even if machiavellianly this choice seems to serve the greater good.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - ghaff 6y ago
      "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.
      - t-writescode 6y ago
        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
- ornornor 6y ago
  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!
  - mcguire 6y ago
    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.)
    - girvo 6y ago
      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)
    - pottertheotter 6y ago
      How is it that people's heads look the same size when they can be so far apart? I guess I need to learn more about all this.
      - Pinus 6y ago
        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.)
- noneeeed 6y ago
  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.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  This article has way better examples than OP. Thanks for sharing!
- handedness 6y ago
  The poisonous journalistic atmosphere which the GP referenced was precisely the impetus behind that much-needed exercise.
  - trhway 6y ago
    Damaging the trust in media and government is a classic "penny smart, pound foolish", and the next time the boy cries wolf things may go differently.
    - MichaelZuo 6y ago
      The media industry seems to be trapped in an enormous sub optimal Nash equilibrium.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        Quarterly earnings are built on eyeball-hours so everyone is optimizing for short term maximization of eyeball hours.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Anyone even vaguely interested in photography knows about lens compression. And here I thought lens compression doesn't exist: https://fstoppers.com/originals/lens-compression-doesnt-exist-147615 https://fstoppers.com/originals/lens-compression-doesnt-exis...
- reedf1 6y ago
  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.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    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. The last 30 seconds of this clip https://youtu.be/yRBNA27N0ts https://youtu.be/yRBNA27N0ts
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      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.
      - schoen 6y ago
        I remember someone mentioning this example: https://vimeo.com/152514220 https://vimeo.com/152514220 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).
re 6y ago
> 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.
- goblin89 6y ago
  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.
  - goblin89 6y ago
    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).
chasd00 6y ago
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.
deleted 6y ago
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brudgers 6y ago
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.
- core-questions 6y ago
  >the longer lens is more conducive to social distancing Why, because you're liable to hit someone with it when you swing around if they don't give you some space?
  - ISL 6y ago
    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.
m463 6y ago
I think that's what photographers do. They pull out the formula menu. Most movies about city things show that shot - the people walking walking walking - moving up and down and never getting closer or further away. And movies in the country always have an aerial shot over the countryside showing trees and roads below, finally zooming in on the car driving.

corty 6y ago

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 ;)

virtue3 6y ago
on a 35mm camera (what used to be standard film) it's 50mm lens is roughly human eye FoV. You really need to know the sensor size to adjust accordingly.
- julvo 6y ago
  That's right. Here's a handy chart with common sensor sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-frame_DSLR#/media/File:SensorSizes.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-frame_DSLR#/media/File:Se... E.g. on a Canon 450D (crop factor 1.6) the equivalent of a 50mm full frame lens is a 30mm lens
- jedimastert 6y ago
  I've always heard it was 35mm. Weird. 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
  - dsego 6y ago
    35 is 50 on a cropped sensor. But I also feel like my vision is closer to 35mm full frame (23 aps-c).
    - throwanem 6y ago
      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...
    - 6y ago

pif 6y ago

> 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.

throwaways885 6y ago
If I can go out safely and I know I & others are respecting the rules, theres zero chance of me staying at home. Lens compression was absolutely making the general public look irresponsible.
- pif 6y ago
  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!
  - another-dave 6y ago
    The linked Danish article in another comment has some good examples of people spaced safely apart but appearing crowded depending on the photo used — https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-paa-hinanden-disse-billeder-er-taget-samtidig-men-viser-to https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-... By sparse enough, do you mean more than 2 metres from each other (as per the guidance in most countries) or some other metric?
- deleted 6y ago
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rutthenut 6y ago

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.

bena 6y ago
Thank you. 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.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > none on the right side in the second Look again. They're not close to the camera, sure, but they're still there off in the distance. Kinda demonstrates the author's point, really.
  - mannykannot 6y ago
    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.
- mannykannot 6y ago
  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.
- 6y ago

PaulHoule 6y ago

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.

alias_neo 6y ago

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.

kzrdude 6y ago
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.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  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.
  - noneeeed 6y ago
    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.

verytrivial 6y ago

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.

FloatArtifact 6y ago

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?

jethro_tell 6y ago
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.
- dd_roger 6y ago
  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.

bloak 6y ago

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.

Brendinooo 6y ago

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.

ghaff 6y ago
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.

w0mbat 6y ago

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.

csours 6y ago
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
- w0mbat 6y ago
  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.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    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.
franga2000 6y ago
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.
- w0mbat 6y ago
  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.

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greggman3 6y ago

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. https://photos.app.goo.gl/LKZKbsqTKxU4SN4y5 https://photos.app.goo.gl/LKZKbsqTKxU4SN4y5 I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar level of crowded this Sunday though I don't plan to walk over to find out.

nitrogen 6y ago
People do seem to be standing a reasonable distance apart though, given the numbers.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

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.

dylan604 6y ago
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".
- ghaff 6y ago
  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).
  - dylan604 6y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >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.

kens 6y ago

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/1224691032173842432 https://twitter.com/akiyoshikitaoka/status/12246910321738424...

10000truths 6y ago
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.

Triv888 6y ago

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).