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So @theheraldsun is running this image of the beach at Ocean Grove yesterday. Looks insanely packed, right? Terrifying. Well, time for a lesson in the impact of lenses on a photo. [Thread].
![So @theheraldsun is running this image of the beach at Ocean Grove yesterday. Looks insanely packed, right? Terrifying. Well, time for a lesson in the impact of lenses on a photo. [Thread].](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgoQk_iVgAEctKs.jpg "So @theheraldsun is running this image of the beach at Ocean Grove yesterday. Looks insanely packed, right? Terrifying. Well, time for a lesson in the impact of lenses on a photo. [Thread].")
I saw the photographer who shot these images. Hard to miss a man carrying a monopod and a lens the side of a toddler. The greater the zoom on a lens, the more it compresses space. Old mate’s lens went to at least 400mm.
Practically, that means that the lens natively compresses the distance between objects. By shooting down the beach, it makes the people look very, very close together.
Ocean Grove was packed yesterday. But for the most part, people were doing a very impressive job of keeping socially distanced. The police were there keeping an eye on things.
This is what the beach actually looked like at the exact time that press photographer was taking those images. Busy, but not nearly so frightening.
Shots like the one in the Herald Sun don’t happen by accident. Nobody goes out shooting with a lens that big unless their photo editor has specifically asked for a shot designed to rile people up. People say that the camera doesn’t lie. It’s not true.
This gif does a terrific job of demonstrating the impact of lens compression.
