Giant Loyle

I got an app for my phone that actually changes the size of people and objects.

Here, my friend Loyle has been transformed into a near-seven-foot giant, and is seen making a shot on my tiny toy pool table.

He didn't like being 6'10" however ("how am I going to fit into my car?"), so I hit another button on the magic app, making him the size of an eight-year-old and restoring my table to its expansive nine-foot length.

(I was just playin' around. Fun with perspective!)

A serious aside: I can't prove this, but I've always believed that as the 182-year history of photography has made its merry way onward, the sophistication of the public in interpreting typical photographic distortions has increased greatly. I undertook a sort of survey of the literature of photography as a student, and it seemed to me that complaints about the various lens distortions were fairly common in the early years even when the distortions themselves were mild. As the decades piled up, people became much more sophisticated as viewers of photographs. We learned to tolerate greater and greater amounts of the kinds of distortions that tended to bother early viewers. The only one I really encounter much these days are complaints about unlevel horizons in seascapes. Tilt that horizon radically, however, and the complaints go quiet—in that case they assume it's intentional. 

As I say, there's no way to prove this. It's just something I believe to be true.

Mike

Book o' the Week

Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz (Laurence King Publishing, 2017). First published in 1994. In this revised edition, the story of street photography is brought up to date with a re-evaluation of some historical material, the inclusion of more contemporary photographers, and a discussion of the ongoing rise of digital photography.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Here's Bystander at The Book Depository. The following logo is also a link:

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Pen Waggener: "Giant Loyle reminds me of a photo my late father published in a rural Kentucky newspaper in 1977. He wrote a sort-of-weekly column for a few years, and his photo of a farmer with a seemingly gigantic pumpkin grabbed the attention of a reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal, who called asking if it was 'trick photography.' Dad assured him that it was not, although he did admit that 'the perspective is somewhat flattering to the pumpkin.' You can see the photo here."

Brian Stewart: "No framed prints on the walls???"

Mike replies: The room isn't actually finished yet...the molding and window framing haven't been done (the trades are in demand here and it's hard to find anybody who will do such a small job). Plus, no lighting yet. So that remains a future project and probably will for a while.

Sroyon (partial comment): "I think you may be on to something here. In a 1971 interview Cartier-Bresson said a 35mm lens(!) is often used by 'people who want to shout,' and that the distortion is an 'aggressive' effect. What's an 'aggressively wide' lens today, maybe 21mm?"

Sean: "My sister has a portrait hanging in her home of her son and daughter taken by yours truly. They all joke about how my nephew’s forearm looks like the size of leg of lamb in the picture ( he was about six in the photo). I tell ya, I don’t get no respect."

Anton Wilhelm Stolzing: "I like this post, and I appreciate it very much. I have read a bit on the theory of photography, inter alia Roland Barthes, but not even he has brought up the interaction between photography and the development of the 'sophistication of the public,' which is also a kind of awareness, I would say. This opens a new field. Kudos, Mike!"

Albert Smith: "Just a reader's plug for Mike's 'Book O' The Week,' Bystander...if you have any interest in street photography across the entire time that it was viable (when cameras were able to be handheld to current times), this is the book. The photos are mostly chronological and nicely annotated with the shooter and the date. Additionally, and very interesting to me, is a long form interview with Joel Meyerowitz, who worked with everyone in the New York street photography A-team, Frank, Winogrand, Arbus, Friedlander and others...cool stuff for those of us of a certain age. Bought mine at Christmas and Mike's recommendation had me taking it off the shelf."

Comments

[Stan B.]

Ya really need to put a little something, something on those walls- come on now!

[Andre Y]

Intentionality is a great thing, but as you say it has to be readable as a deliberate choice instead of an accidental one: a slight tilt instead of a big tilt, for example is probably seen as a thoughtless artifact. Or picking the cut point of an object at the edge of your frame, so it's cut off exactly right down its middle instead of haphazardly sticking a little bit of itself inside your frame reads as pretty intentional.

And of course, there has to be some expressive/artistic purpose in doing so, which helps people who haven't seen it before accept it more readily. Shooting portraits with a very close perspective and a wide angle lens doesn't seem to make sense until you see Platon do it.

[Sroyon]

That's an interesting hypothesis about increasing tolerance for distortion. I wonder if the process is still ongoing, given how more and more photos are taken on phones with an angle of view similar to 25-28mm on full frame. In which case, one way to (sort of) test it would be to show your Loyle photos to a representative sample, say 100 people (mix of photographers and non-photographers), and get them to fill up a survey form. And then repeat the exercise thirty years later and see if the responses are different.

But I think you may be on to something here. In a 1971 interview Cartier-Bresson said a 35mm lens(!) is often used by "people who want to shout", and that the distortion is an "aggressive" effect. What's an "aggressively wide" lens today, maybe 21mm?

It's kind of ironic that the increasing tolerance for distortion (if true) coincides with increasingly easier ways to correct distortion in post. You will know more about this than I do, but I believe perspective distortion, unless corrected at source with camera movements, used to require darkroom trickery (Scheimpflug principle), while barrel or pincushion distortion were (I think) essentially impossible to correct. Now these can all be fixed with just a few clicks with software.

[Tom Burke]

I remember reading in the early 1980s that lenses wider than 28mm should be used sparingly and with caution, because of their extreme perspective. (This might have been in Amateur Photographer.) Today, the main lens on an iPhone 12 is the equivalent of 26mm, and of course there’s also a 13mm-equivalent ‘ultrawide’.

Here in the UK the magazine i-D broke all the photographic rules for portraiture when it was founded in the 1980s - e.g. portraits taken close-up with a very wide-angle lens, together with their ‘straight up’ series of images. That magazine, and all its imitators, changed people’s perceptions of what was acceptable.

[Bahi]

Fully agreed with your hunch. I think many of us are used to at least 35mm-equivalent angles of view and perhaps even 28mm. That definitely didn't used to be the case. And photos from a 35mm seem pretty much normal now.

[Roger Bradbury]

I think you're telling us a tall tale... :)

Meanwhile, I've seen a lot of YouTube videos with the presenter filmed at close range because they've used a wideangle lens. It makes them ugly. They are so close that if they lean forward six inches the perspective changes and so does the shape of their face.

It's not nice.

[Steve Deutsch]

"Tilt that horizon radically" - ah, the difference between a faux pas and a fashion statement.

[Patrick Perez]

"As I say, there's no way to prove this. It's just something I believe to be true." Michael Johnston

"It's not that I believe it, but that I believe it" - Sir Thomas More (or should I credit it to Robert Bolt?)

[Stan B.]

Sroyan- One can also use a long telephoto to distort and exaggerate perspective. With experience, one can take complimentary, environmental portraits using 28 or 20mm lenses with careful placement of the subject withing the composition- instead of exemplifying the given WA distortion.