President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden went to meet former President Jimmy Carter and former first lady Rosalynn Carter last week but it resulted in a controversial photograph. Now what can be so out of place about a photograph of four well-dressed people, especially when the US President later said: “We just had a nice time”?
Reporters were not allowed inside the house but when photos of the four of them appeared, one of them made the Carters appear like Hobbits. Not that the Bidens are gigantic but camera trickery was at play. Newspapers have tried to reach out to Adam Schultz, the chief official White House photographer, for an explanation, which hasn’t been forthcoming, except a confirmation that he had taken the shot.
Camera perspective
The photograph was probably taken with a wide-angle lens, which can distort elements in photos and create a difference in scale. Also used, a strong flash. But there’s more to it.
When taking photographs in confined spaces, there is not enough room to move back far enough to get everyone in the frame. In such cases, the lens can do the trick. The wide-angle lens — generally used to photograph landscapes and crowded interiors — usually have focal lengths between 16mm and 35mm, according to USA Today. Below 20mm is considered ultra-wide.
Going ultra-wide makes objects closer to the camera appear far bigger than the objects that are even a little distance away.
Jimmy Carter is around 5ft and 10inches tall while Rosalynn Carter is 5.5ft. Biden is a tad under 6ft while “the first lady is about half a foot shorter”. What happened with the photograph in question is that the Carters are leaning back while the Bidens are a few inches closer to the lens. Had the Bidens and the Carters been seated on exactly the same plane, the effect wouldn’t have been so obvious. If you look closely at the shoes of the two presidents, they are on a similar scale but not the bodies.
Helping the distortion are the chairs. In a wide-angle shot, the centre tends to look natural. If you start moving towards the edge of the photo, proportions begin to distort.
Though it cannot be confirmed, it seems like the photographer had used a wide-angle lens like the Nikon 14-24mm or Canon 16-35mm zooms, which are popular with photojournalists.
Of course, one may ask why the distortion wasn’t corrected. It could have been but that’s not ethical. White House photojournalists are not allowed to crop a photograph, which may give it a different meaning and neither are they allowed to change perspectives, like in the photo in question.
To compensate for the wide-angle lens on the iPhone 12 Pro, we changed distance and the result was a perspective distortion. Pictures: The Telegraph
Try it at home
Not just with a DSLR, you can see the distortion while taking pictures on your smartphone. Unless you are careful, the ultra-wide camera (if the phone has it) can play up and give you some hilarious photographs. At times, the distortion results in creative snaps.
Take a picture without asking the subject to move. When you move closer or farther away from the subject, there is something like perspective distortion. It’s not about the lens. It’s about the distance between the camera and the subject and the relative distance between objects in the image. Move into ultra-wide angle mode. The distortion is greater.
If you are taking a portrait shot on your smartphone, to fill the frame, you have to get close to the subject. Say you need a full-frame headshot and that means you can be, say, a few inches away from the face. In such a situation, the distance between the tip of the nose and the ears is probably about the same. When you change the distance to factor in a wide-angle lens, perspective is distorted. It’s much more about the distance than the lens.
A controversial photo taken by Orange County Register of people gathering in Newport Beach to cool off on a hot day on April 25, 2020. In reality, the beach wasn’t as crowded as it’s shown in the photo; the use of a telephoto lens created the perception. Photo: OCR
Pictures can be controversial
Basically, a change of perspective and focal length can change the story. This was seen last year, soon after the pandemic had started. A picture of a beach in California — published in Orange County Register — made the rounds, showing hundreds of people lying around. The photo wasn’t doctored, but it was taken using a telephoto lens, which made the beach look overcrowded. Some people even accused OCR of using a stock photo.
Photographer Mindy Schauer, who has worked at the Register for more than 20 years, shot the photo from the Newport Beach pier with a long lens because she wanted to get as much of the beach as she could. The EXIF data for the OCR photo shows that it was shot at a focal length of 380mm on a Nikon D5. Lens compression at 380mm is very noticeable.
We think a wide-angle lens distorts a scene while a telephoto lens compresses a scene. In reality, the distance from the camera to the subject creates these distortions. The folks at Fstoppers have a good explanation for it. To double or halve the size of an object in your frame, you will have to double or halve the distance of the camera to that object, but not everything in the frame is the same distance away from the camera. Your subject might be close while the background is farther away.
