Flat looking

Can someone explain the term for me in regard to a portrait photo said to be flat looking. Any photo as example of this along side a good portrait photo would be helpfull.

Regards ian

At the risk of publicising oneself, this might help link

Basically it's very 2D with hardly any information from the
3rd dimension, which is missing because a telephoto lens was
used. Sometimes looking at it from a distance helps, but the
3rd dimension info just isn't there so it never looks right.

You can see it in movies where a person running towards
the camera looks as though their legs are just going up
and down and hardly moving forward.

-

also referred to as "Compression of field" where features from fore ground and background are compressed in perspective... ie keeping the subject filling the same area of the frame but shooting the same subject, say a portrait, the subjects nose might appear bigger with a wide angle then a telephoto due to the tel's effect pulling the rest of the face closer to the tip of the nose.... compressing the image..
another example here:


with the cabin in the background being hundreds of yards away, through deep snow, I ised a 400 mm lens to "compress the field ) and pull the cabin in to fill the back ground of my image.....

and no I do not consider 100,, to be too flattening for my portriats.... I use lighting to bring back the 3-d

Nice shot Don

Do all dogs in Canada have a flat face
It's nose looks to be in line with it's eye's

wuz chasin parked cars... nice dog, but not too bright..

I came accross this nice example of a flat landscape.
There looks to be very little distance between the fence
and the house.

-

It's a Sam, so fiercely loyal but lacking a few brain cells. Handsome beasty. My son has one

Now to the OP do you mean flat as in 2 dimensional due to the above or flat as in lighting/colour?

matching jumpers....very awkwardfamilyphotos.com

I always thought "flat" referred to lighting and the telephoto effect referred to as "compressed" :

PS: very nice shot Don.

Me too Alan, that's why I was asking for clarification.

Flat lighting gives flat images, with no modelling of the features. There are plenty of ways to use lighting to give modelling, or shape, to the face. An egg is a suitable object to experiment on, trying to make it look different shapes with different lighting arrangements.

Telephoto compression is something entirely different. Modest telephoto lenses are generally considered the most flattering for portraits. This is because we stand further back and the nose doesn't seem out of proportion to the rest of the face.

The telephoto actually magnifies/enlarges the image, which is the opposite
of compression, so using the word compression would be misleading. The view is also becoming more and more 2D which is also called flat. It's also the opposite of depth in photographic terms.

It's amazing that in only a few years of flat monitors people seem to have forgotten what proper photography is It was the 35mm and 50mm lenses on Leica cameras that made the likes of the Magnum photographers famous. Their photographs were great because they had great depth to them. They didn't stand safely 50m away with 135/200mm lenses, they moved right in for the impact shots. There was a massive interest in the wide angle 24/28mm shots that appeared in publications like the Sunday Times Colour Supplement. Now it seems people can't tell the difference between a shot that has depth and one that is flat
Something that even non-photographers could see in the 70's

I hope someone isn't now going to start a thread asking what depth in
a photograph is.

-

All telephoto lenses do is mean we can stand further away. As a consequence the perspective is compressed, no two ways about it. There's no point misleading people and confusing them.

In the hope that it asists, I quote from the Pentax publication "The Eyes", page 15:

Yes, telephoto lenses magnify. Yes, they result in perspective compression.

If you don't want to mislead people don't refer to long
lenses as telephoto lenses unless they contain a telephoto
group! Ha! Ha!

And an 8X telephoto or a 8X pair of binoculars should
be a Div by 4 telephoto or a Div by 4 pair of binoculars

And a Magnifying Glass should be called a Dividing Glass

-