https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-26-hvor-taet-er-folk-...
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.
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
(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.)
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 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.
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).
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?
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.
And here I thought lens compression doesn't exist:
https://fstoppers.com/originals/lens-compression-doesnt-exis...
The last 30 seconds of this clip https://youtu.be/yRBNA27N0ts
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).
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.
If you switch to a lens with higher magnification, that's an indirect reason. It may or may not make you move farther away. But the distortion/appearance is due to the distance.
Also, you may crop photos (ie digital zoom) or use a different sensor size or sensor distance.
At the end of the day, the necessary and sufficient condition for the change in appearance is the distance.the lens is neither sufficient nor necessary.
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?
> 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...
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.”
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.
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".
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.
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.
Why, because you're liable to hit someone with it when you swing around if they don't give you some space?
70 mm and higher really allows a lot of distance. The pandemic has definitely changed things, at least temporarily.
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.