reminder for Kerry Park pictures: back-away-and-pinch-zoom is your friend (up to a point)

I know next to nothing about photography tricks, but I can remember this:

If you are taking a picture of a person with a background far behind them, when you back away, the people get smaller but the background stays the same size. Then when you zoom in, the people go back to their original size but the background becomes much larger.

Of course the trade-off is that if you pinch-zoom too much, the pixelation becomes noticeable, depending on how you’re viewing the photo. On a phone, I can’t see the pixelation on any of these photos; on a desktop, I can see it in the last one and a little in the middle one. So you can take photos from several different distances, always zooming in so the people are about the same size, and they can pick the one that is the best trade-off between background size and pixelation.

I didn’t think of this at the time, but with the pixelation of the picture on the right, it looks almost like they’re standing in front of a backdrop; it would probably look less like a backdrop if the photo had included the people’s feet planted on the ground.

(I know the women in the photo; they were fine with this being posted to illustrate the trick.)

Bonus tip for Kerry Park: If you’re bringing people who have never been there before, as you’re going uphill on Queen Anne Ave N, instead of turning left on Highland, turn left on Prospect, then right on 5th and right on Highland, so you approach the park from the west instead of the east. It’s much easier to find parking on the west, and that way you “preserve the surprise” of what the view from the park looks like, until they walk up to it from the west and the view hits them all at once. Otherwise, if you pass the park from the east while looking for parking, it spoils the surprise.