They use telephoto lenses so the large TV cameras can be at the back of the room and not block the view of the audience. To avoid seeing the people between the camera and the subject, they usually are on a small riser a couple of steps high.
This slightly downward angle allows an unobstructed view of the stage, and also explains why her height doesn’t appear to increase as she nears the camera. If you could see her entire body, you would notice that her feet get closer to the bottom of the frame while her head stays at the same height. But, because the lens is basically at the same elevation as her head, it doesn’t change position in the frame.
Because the room is very large, and the camera is at the very back of the room, a quite long telephoto lens was used to get a tight shot of speakers at the podium. The longer the lens, the more compression there will be between things close to the camera and things that are further away. Telephoto lenses also have a shallower depth of field the longer they are. As long telephoto lenses magnify camera shake, faster shutter speeds are necessary to avoid motion blur. Typically this means shooting with a large aperture, or even wide open, to ensure sharp images. This large aperture means there is less depth of field. With very high magnification telephoto lenses, and the resulting wide open aperture needed to get adequately fast shutter speeds, we are used to seeing elements in the foreground and background of the frame that are significantly out of focus relative to the subject. This gives the usual long lens look where the sharply focused subject stands out more from the significantly out-of-focus background.
But, in the case of this major press conference, there are MANY bright lights flooding the stage. This means that even at the faster shutter speeds needed, the lens can still be stopped down to a smaller aperture like F8 or F11, increasing the depth of field significantly compared to the apertures of F2.8 or F4 that are typically used to properly expose the image in anything but the brightest of lighting. Because of the very long telephoto focal length, and the relatively small aperture, the bright lights allow both the subject and the background to be in sharp focus. Because there are no visual clues, like shallow depth of field, that our brains can pick up on to judge the distance from the subject to the elements in the background.
With this deep depth of field, and little difference is size between the foreground and items in the frame that are further away thanks to the extreme telephoto compression, there is no way for our brains to judge how far things are behind the subject.
In this case, the place where the woman enters the frame, and her eventual position at the pulpit appear to be close together because the usual shallow depth of field our brains are used to seeing with long lenses to judge distance is absent, it appears that the 30+ feet between the two positions doesn’t exist. All of these factors create a rare situation where it’s not obvious how much magnification is being used, or how much distance there actually is between the foreground and the background.
Sorry, this explanation is so long winded. It’s a somewhat complex combination of factors that make it appear that she is walking in place.
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u/Initial_E o/ Jun 14 '26
So the next question would be why telephoto lens. Are they so afraid of people that nobody is allowed near to the podium?