Telephoto fear: how lenses affect views of crowds

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.

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.

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?

Another example is "we use AC power on the grid because it's more efficient than DC for transmission." Nope. High voltage is more efficient for transmission; we use AC only because Thomas Edison didn't have silicon carbide power transistors.

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?

Why, because you're liable to hit someone with it when you swing around if they don't give you some space?

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

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.

E.g. on a Canon 450D (crop factor 1.6) the equivalent of a 50mm full frame lens is a 30mm lens

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

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.

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!