No, Joe Biden Is Not 8ft (and Other Camera Tricks)
On Monday, a photograph emerged showing President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden kneeling next to Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. The older couple is overshadowed by the Biden; Joe and Jill look like heads of state the size of a cannibal, while the Carters look the size of a smurf, buried in their large, floral chairs.
This makes the photo fun, but obviously doesn’t tell the real size of each person. Joe Biden isn’t tall enough to dunk, and Jimmy Carter isn’t really that small. So why does it look like this?
Well, photographers regularly have to use techniques that make photography possible, while the conditions of their work make it nearly impossible. In the case of the Biden and Carters, the photographer needed to gather four people, all in a small room, in one shot. As a result, we end up with a few common photo tricks that we actually see quite often, but usually don’t think twice.
Why the Biden looked so big (and the Carters so small)
Jack Crosby, a photographer and writer, tells Lifehacker that the size mismatch basically boils down to the following two things: “Basically what you see is kind of a bad shot as the photographer had to use a wide-angle lens in what was probably it was a pretty small room, ”he says.
“With a wide-angle lens, everything stretches around the edges,” Crosby continues, noting that what you see in wide-angle photography is a fisheye effect.
There’s also the fact that Carters are smallerthan the Bidens, just not to the extent shown in the picture. Sitting didn’t help either, as Crosby explains:
Posture is also important in this shot as both Carters are seated folded in chairs and the Biden are kneeling in front of the camera.
So the photographer actually needed to get four people huddled into a small room in one shot, and using a wide-angle lens gave the Carter push-off effect a little deeper, and the Biden looked larger.
What other tricks do photographers use?
There are many other tricks that photographers regularly use, most of which go unnoticed by regular readers. Here are some of them that we encounter most often:
Telephoto lenses can make places more crowded than they are
One thing that observers should always keep in mind is the one frame limitation. As New York-based photojournalist Scott Haynes told Lifehacker, pocket cameras can only capture such a large area from a single shot:
There may be thirteen people attending a protest / march, but I could photograph them up close with a telephoto lens to give the impression that the event was overcrowded.
Hynes says telephoto lenses are often used to create the illusion of a compressed space, when in reality the area being photographed is not that crowded. “A telephoto lens compresses the distance between objects, so people appear much closer to each other in depth,” he says.
In the early days of the pandemic, this kind of photography caused a stir, especially when crowds of people were photographed in parks. The images of revelers incapable of social distance shocked the uneducated observer, but in fact the people were much further apart than they seemed.
Composition can make people look together when they really don’t.
One of the lesser known techniques that is often used, especially in an editorial sense, is compositing. This usually happens when you are trying to gather many, many people in one frame, when it is unlikely that all objects will ever actually end up in one place. This applies to “the photographs you often see in magazines, which are large group shots,” says Hynes.
He goes on to explain:
Like the rest of the Star Wars cast, these photographs are very often multiple shots stitched together because it is almost impossible to get all 6-20 people in a room together at the same time. This goes beyond just Photoshop for a bunch of people on the cover, as a “set” of a photo (often a large, beautiful room) pretty firmly assumes that everyone is posing in the same place.
Of course, you can determine when this is done with a standard tool like Photoshop, as some edited images can look rather crude. When it comes to truly professional work, however, it becomes a little trickier to determine when a trick is going on behind the scenes.