Called Out by a Reader … Wrongly

The Reader’s Representative Journal at the Los Angeles Times got a question from a reader pertaining to a photo they had published and suggesting they look into it.

Turns out, there’s nothing wrong with the image – it was made with a 400 mm lens and a 2x converter, which means it was shot at a focal length of 800 mm, giving the image a very large amount of compression. But the piece, and the comments that follow it, are a decent discussion of how suspicious readers are of photographs now – and should act as another warning to us that reality matters.