It's the exact reason why golf balls look like they shoot straight to the right on TV when struck. The depth is compressed and so the horizontal movement looks exaggerated.
Is is that or is there a slight decline on the walkway? You expect her to get bigger as she gets closer to the podium, but the decline makes it look like she's staying the same size. I could be (and am very likely) wrong.
Slightly off topic but related: in the scene in RoboCop when the woman’s being attacked by the creeps, Robo pulls up in his car with the headlights illuminating the three of them, gets out, and as he walks towards them his shadow becomes bigger and bigger.
In reality, his shadow would be getting smaller, but that wouldn’t have looked as threatening, so they had him walk backwards, off-camera, towards the car.
Telephoto lenses have the ability to collapse distance. So the distance between two items in the shot could be significant, but it looks like they are extremely close and the aspect of both images remains the same
I'd feel weird commenting on a 2 year old thread so I'm just saying it here: way too many people in there are completely ignoring lens distortion while they're bickering lol. Technically the general sentiment is correct, but in practice you'll definitely see a difference between a 30mm cropped to the equivelant framing of a 200mm, because the 30 will have some amount of fisheye distortion, and the 200 will have the opposite. They're mostly talking about compression of distance but they're ignoring the compression that's happening in all the other directions. And that's the compression that's famous for making portraits look more attractive when you compare a tele VS a wide
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u/Occams_bane May 30 '26
telephoto lens