[HN Gopher] Telephoto fear: how lenses affect views of crowds
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Telephoto fear: how lenses affect views of crowds
Author : _cs2017_
Score : 278 points
Date : 2021-01-27 10:26 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mainichi.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (mainichi.jp)
| corty wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| > 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.
| steerablesafe wrote:
| 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.
| julvo wrote:
| That's right. Here's a handy chart with common sensor sizes:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 35 is 50 on a cropped sensor. But I also feel like my
| vision is closer to 35mm full frame (23 aps-c).
| throwanem wrote:
| 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...
| bborud wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| My understanding is that it's actually ~40mm (or even
| 42mm). But of course that's not a standard focal length, so
| either 50mm or 35mm is closest.
|
| EDIT: Ah yes, I remembered correctly https://theonlinephoto
| grapher.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
| ghaff wrote:
| ~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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| It's true. But it's also not nearly as common as 50mm (or
| even 35mm) on DSLRs
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| lmilcin wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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.
| bborud wrote:
| ...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.
| heftig wrote:
| What if you compare a wide angle shot with a panorama created
| from multiple normal lens shots?
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| reedf1 wrote:
| 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.
| brudgers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| re wrote:
| > 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.
| stretchcat wrote:
| > _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?
| tomatocracy wrote:
| 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.
| goblin89 wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| phreeza wrote:
| 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-...
| ornornor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| handedness wrote:
| The poisonous journalistic atmosphere which the GP referenced
| was precisely the impetus behind that much-needed exercise.
| trhway wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The media industry seems to be trapped in an enormous sub
| optimal Nash equilibrium.
| noneeeed wrote:
| 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.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes we agree with each other.
| gabriel34 wrote:
| 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]
| ghaff wrote:
| "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.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| This article has way better examples than OP. Thanks for
| sharing!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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-exis...
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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?
| bitcurious wrote:
| > 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."
| vilhelm_s wrote:
| 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.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 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]
|
| [0] https://store.nikon.co.uk/nikkor-lenses-nikkor-z-
| lenses/nikk...
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.)
| ajuc wrote:
| > 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".
| kzrdude wrote:
| Fstoppers also made this video to go with it, it shows what
| they mean very well.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TTXY1Se0eg
| moron4hire wrote:
| 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.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's an explanation that helps the photographer understand
| how it actually works - greater understanding that
| generalizes better.
| reedf1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| m463 wrote:
| 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.
| verytrivial wrote:
| 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.
| pif wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
|
| By sparse enough, do you mean more than 2 metres from each
| other (as per the guidance in most countries) or some other
| metric?
| greggman3 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| People do seem to be standing a reasonable distance apart
| though, given the numbers.
| [deleted]
| rutthenut wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| Better examples
| https://mobile.twitter.com/baekdal/status/125446016781241548...
| ghaff wrote:
| That is much better.
|
| 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.
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Bluestrike2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0. https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-
| folk-...
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| Bluestrike2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0. https://capturetheatlas.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/04/under...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ehnto wrote:
| 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.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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.
| nitrogen wrote:
| 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?
| danbolt wrote:
| I'm looking forward to their nostalgic memes on the
| topic.
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.
| alias_neo wrote:
| 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.
| codezero wrote:
| If anything I'm hoping this event normalized wearing masks
| to help reduce seasonal flus.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| bborud wrote:
| That certainly explains why a lot of cameras can be
| configured to save RAW+JPEG.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| w0mbat wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| w0mbat wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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.
| w0mbat wrote:
| 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.
| csours wrote:
| That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
| w0mbat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bloak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kens wrote:
| 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...
| 10000truths wrote:
| 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.
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