How to Recognize a Misleading Crowd Photo
When businesses reopen and people head to beaches and parks, you’ve likely seen news photos or videos depicting people packed into dense crowds, blithely defying social distancing rules. But these photos can be misleading, and that’s thanks to the camera trick.
When capturing crowds, photographers often use a zoom lens or telephoto lens. This compresses the foreground and background of the image , making everyone look closer together. For example, in an article on crowd photography, the Outdoor Photography Guide writes that the 300mm lens “compresses the crowd and makes it bigger, but more compact, producing brighter and more powerful photos.”
What it means when you look at photos of the news (not to mention the Twitter threads that dishonor states for opening too early): This photo of the “crowd” could actually be people strewn across a beach or park where not really crowded. all.
This technique can be used to deliberately mislead, but it’s also just a convenient way to show a lot of people in a crowd so that they don’t all appear in different sizes and with a lot of space in between. I want to make it clear that a photographer using this technique is not necessarily trying to lie to you; there may be another reason why they photographed the scene the way they did. For example, one newspaper editor commented that a photographer filming a reopening beach “took the picture … with a telephoto lens because she wanted to get as much of the beach as possible to accurately capture the scene.” For better or worse, this is a common crowd shooting technique.
How a long lens can distort a scene
This is an aerial photo of the same beach on the same day, taken by the same photographer as the photo at the top of this page. See the red and white umbrella in the lower left corner of the aerial shot? Okay, okay. Now find a red blanket with a dark green umbrella at the top center.
Now scroll up and look at these two umbrellas in another shot. (Red and white umbrella in the center of the photo, dark green near the camera.)
From this original shot, you can understand that people with green umbrellas are directly in front of a dark blue towel. From a height you can see that they are quite far away. Considering that most people are between five and six feet tall, you can use sunbathers to measure the scale – are people six feet apart? Much more in most cases.
As an extra lesson on how different camera lens lengths can change the appearance of a crowd, landscape architect Jeff Cutler photographed the local beach with several different lenses to show exactly what everyone sees.
This camera trick works with video too: the example in this tweet is a particularly egregious example, as stated in one of the replies . Is this Ocean City, Maryland boardwalk packed? There are definitely more people without masks in one location than is probably reasonable, but the camera lens exaggerates the density:
Watch the video and calculate for yourself. The carrying man appears at 0:03 and appears to be directly over the shoulder of the woman who is still in the foreground:
… but by the time the clip ends – 20 steps and 13 seconds later – he’s still behind her.
These misleading shots of the crowd are a problem when we reopen because people are nervous. Many of us try to avoid crowds, and these images give the impression that our neighbors are ignoring the rules of physical distancing. There may be some of them, but the situation is probably not as dire as the photographs show.
Here’s another example of a restaurant that reopened when regulations required tables to be farther apart than usual. The photo shows that the rules are not being followed; the photo from another angle (provided by the restaurant ) tells a different story.
Meanwhile, these photos and videos give us a reason to argue with each other on social media, which further exacerbates the tension. If the infections do not increase upon reopening – perhaps because people are careful while walking and keeping proper distance – you know that someone is going to dig up these photographs to claim that everything was overcrowded and everything in any the case turned out to be.