I am the thing that goes blog in the night. Hi, I'm Cameo. Cam for short, Cammy to my oldest friends. I like spooky stuff, drawing, weird words, fancy clothes, and tall buildings. I'm an aficionado of all things surreal, a born Knowledge Sim, a cosplayer whose relationship with the sewing machine is fraught, and a practicing but dubiously competent traceur. I like strange things that nobody's ever heard of. I'm also asexual, hence the preponderance of asexuality-related jargle, and at some point I lost my gender behind the sofa. I haven't substantively changed my blog description in 12 years and I refuse to start now. (They/them.) My art tag is 'camdraw'. I have a ko-fi, if you would like to buy me fast food, cosplay supplies and luridly patterned clothing.
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I think Amelia’s book would have served to reframe her takeover of the train as, at least initially, a good thing. On some level, I think it was a good thing.
When we first meet Amelia in Book 4, she’s in some form of Dialogue with One; he’s walking her through the proceedings of the train, laying it all out for her. And frankly, he’s framed a lot like a supervillian here.
This isn’t the One-one that traveled with Tulip. He’s a united front, with a specific goal and ethos. His name drips with ego. He’s cold, calculating. He’s a robot hidden behind an uncanny face. He knows the train kills people. Probably a lot of people. He doesn’t care. They fix their shit- with limited guidance and resources- or they die. For all intents and purposes, he’s either PG Jigsaw or he’s playing Metatron to one.
Then there’s Amelia. Amelia, about whom we can observe several things;
She’s known to have a knack for subverting tyrannical, bureaucratic systems. She undercuts the phone company. She jokingly tries to talk Alric into ditching graduation. She does poorly in a classroom setting but she’s brilliant when she applies herself.
In an era when all passengers have specific uniforms-branded with One’s face, no less, Amelia is wearing the boots, (which physically can’t be removed) but not the soulless; identity-erasing uniform.
She’s penetrated very far into the infrastructure of the train. You don’t get this far on your first day, or without subverting a lot of systems to get One’s personal, undivided attention.
She has no Denizen with her here. That’s odd; with the exception of Grace, most passengers tend to accumulate denizens pretty quickly after they board the train. Kez demonstrates that, under One, this is what Denizens do- it’s their duty to explain the set-up and assist the passengers, although she personally isn’t “conventionally” good at it (she helps by being so incompetent they have to devise workarounds to the problems she creates.)
So what we’re looking at here is coded like a Bond Villain Speech to a protagonist that you’d get at the climax. This is after the plucky, headstrong, anti-authoritarian heroine has pushed through countless dangers on the train proper, to break into the inner sanctum of a sanctimonious demigod. This is after she’s asserted her individuality with clothes instead of a uniform.
This is after any denizens she potentially encountered have left her company; maybe through second-act heroic sacrifice, or just by being left behind when One brought her into the main tour. (It’s possible she never encountered any, but from a meta standpoint it’s unlikely the whole book would have been her with One-One and no one else.)
In the construction of a typical horror thriller or heroic action adventure, we’d be witnessing zero hour.
Now let’s look at her influence on Ryan and Min’s adventure. She exerts influence twice; once at the Party Car, and once at the castle.
In the Party car, she gives them back their stuff. Ryan’s Guitar, Min-Gi’s minisynth, their clothes. All flatly necessary to get through the car, to resolve their problems in general, and it’s pretty clear that One wasn’t going to give them that stuff if Amelia hadn’t suggested it; she’s in some kind of dialogue with him that can be heard through the Steward.
And someone pointed out that in the other seasons, the stuff that the passengers bring on board with them is a reflection of themselves, their strengths and their pasts. Someone aside from me pointed out that under One’s system, Tulip wouldn’t have had the pocket knife that she used to rescue Lake- and that was the only conceivable takeaway from that car, that you need to extend empathy even to people who are hurting you while pursuing their own needs. They pointed out that without his phone and the recording, Lake wouldn’t have been able to help Jesse through his issue with Nate and Troy. He could have kept dancing around that forever.
So this is clearly Amelia at a point where she’s trying to introduce a Reform to a broken system. And it’s a good one!
The second time she shows up, she takes the pair’s magnoboots, proclaims that “we are on our own,” and (accidently) self-destructs the stewards. That’s a demonstration that she’s in control at this point, if not competent control.
It’s telling that the most prominent thing One’s regime provides to the Passengers are boots that can be used as restraining bolts if they start doing something he doesn’t like. It’s also telling that Amelia’s first act as Conductor was to remove those restraining bolts from everyone on the train.
Her breakdown at the end of Book One is at least partially informed by her knowledge of how callously One-One ran things when she hadn’t rendered him a complete moron. Her brusque, no-nonsense attitude in Book 3 results from the fact that she’s not actually sorry about overthrowing One-One; she recognizes that there was a mechanical limit stopping her from bringing back Alrick, that she took One-One’s little speech about the train being capable of anything too literally, and that her time in charge could have been spent far more productively. But that was purely a practical error, not necessarily a moral one; she isn’t shown to care about denizens any more than One One or the Apex do, and she doesn’t care about the train working beyond what’s necessary to burn off her sentence.
Considering all of this, I think that a book about Amelia would have been framed as a full-circle revolution; a story about Dorothy finding the man behind the curtain, finding him lacking, and usurping him. The tragedy isn’t that the real conductor was overthrown; the tragedy is that Amelia fails to improve meaningfully on his performance. She failed to recognize her newfound capacity, and her moral responsibility, to improve the system for everyone; Instead, she got lost for thirty years in the pipe dream of bringing back Alrick, with nothing to show for it but turtles.
Understanding perspective and magnification really helped me become a more intuitive photographer. But all of the tutorials and online classes I've taken have done such a poor job explaining it. Photography education will often give you a rule and then tell you the effect. But there is no explanation why the rule has that effect.
If you move too close, the face distorts.
This was taken with an ultra wide angle lens. It was almost touching my nose. It's implied that this goofy level of distortion is caused by a wide angle lens. You'll even hear it said "wide angle lenses distort things."
Why? What is the lens doing?
It is said that a telephoto lens compresses facial features.
Why? What is the lens doing?
In both cases, these effects are not some optical quirk caused by the type of lens. The lens isn't distorting the image. The lens isn't compressing the image.
The effects are changes in perspective and magnification.
Here is a quick breakdown that may help.
Perspective only changes with distance.
Magnification is any time you make something larger in frame.
Magnification can be achieved by physically moving closer, zooming, or cropping.
So if you move the perspective closer, you also magnify.
But you can magnify a perspective without changing distance by reducing the field of view via zoomier lenses or cropping.
Put simply... if you move, that's perspective.
If something gets bigger in the frame, that's magnification.
Perspective changes our perception of distance and geometry.
In this example, I move closer and farther to some basic shapes to show how they distort.
A close perspective exaggerates distance and shapes. Near things look bigger, far things look smaller. But if you take a far perspective and magnify to equal size in frame, distances and geometry remain more stable and less distorted.
If you've ever taken any art classes, you may have learned about the vanishing point where all angles converge off into the distance.
Buildings are not the only thing that has a vanishing point. They just have simple geometry, which helps you observe the effect.
This close perspective of a dog is no different from the buildings.
Something without perspective is called an orthographic projection. This is where all angles are parallel forever—with no vanishing point.
As you move farther away, a perspective projection appears to be almost orthographic. And if you magnify that far perspective, it looks similar to an orthographic cube.
But the far perspective still has a vanishing point, it just takes much longer to converge.
This video game allows you to play with perspective or orthographic projections.
The near cubes look very different. But the far cubes have similar geometry.
Why does a close perspective look distorted? Why does a far perspective look nearly orthographic?
This all has to do with the relative distances from the point of view of the observer. Let's move on to the real world to help explain this.
Perspective distortion is caused when the lens is very close to a subject. Only wide angle lenses have the field of view and the close focusing distance to get close enough to create severe perspective distortion.
Despite erroneous claims of eyeballs being like 50mm lenses, humans actually have a decently wide field of view. If you hold the end of a long cylinder close to your eye, you will see the same geometric distortion and dramatic vanishing point. When people are accused of misjudging the size of... cylinders, it's possible they just had a very close perspective that exaggerated geometry.
Perspective can alter our perception of size.
So the lens gives you the ability to *see* the distortion, but it doesn't *cause* the distortion.
Image 1 is taken a few inches from the subject with an ultra wide angle lens. It is magnified by moving closer.
Image 4 is taken from much farther away. It is magnified by using a telephoto lens.
Why does his left ear disappear in image 1?
It's a simple case of obstruction. The cheek is literally in the way at that near perspective.
If I stand very close to this wall, I cannot see the walkway to the right.
The walkway is physically obstructed at this close perspective. I can't see around corners.
But if I change my perspective…
Light needs a clear pathway to the point of observation.
Why does his ear seem to grow larger and larger as the perspective changes?
If you'll excuse my bad drawring...
In the top example, the lens is only 2 units away from the nose, but it is 6 units away from the ear.
The ear is 200% farther away than the nose.
In the bottom example, the lens is now 30 units away from the nose and 34 units away from the ear.
The ear is now only 14% farther away than the nose. The relative distance is less exaggerated.
Distant ear percentages are hard to visualize. What if I moved only my nose 200% closer?
If we upscale this concept, it can be easier to understand.
(My examples are going to be shitty smartphone photos taken at night with my trash bins. I'm hoping you will forgive that. If I had more energy, I would have taken better photos with more appealing subjects.)
These two trash bins are only a few feet apart. The black trash bin represents the ear. The blue trash bin represents the nose.
If I take a photo from a foot away...
From this perspective, the black bin is roughly 80% smaller than the blue bin. The blue bin is very close to the lens. The far bin is several hundred percent farther away from the lens. So it takes up a very small percentage of the frame.
So, big nose, tiny ears.
What if we magnified this perspective?
Note the little box on the house far in the background.
If we crop the image and thus magnify the same perspective...
That little box looks much bigger. But this "telephoto" field of view does not allow us to see both trash bins. The perspective hasn't changed, just the magnification.
I am making something small in the background much bigger. The distant perspective makes the object more orthographic. And when I magnify that perspective, it appears more compressed, more flat.
This is a digital crop of a wide field of view. A telephoto lens is essentially an optical crop. It magnifies the perspective in the same way. The advantage of an optical crop is that it maintains all the detail. Whereas a digital crop throws away a bunch of pixels.
A magnification of perspective is often referred to as "lens compression." This is an inaccurate legacy term that causes much confusion. It would be more accurate to call it "perspective compression," but it is very hard to change terminology in photography education.
The lens is not compressing the object. I used a very wide lens and just by cropping after the fact, I was able to get the same perspective compression as if I had used a telephoto lens. The wide field of view makes far away stuff very tiny in frame. So we struggle to notice the flatness. It isn't until we magnify the distant object that the "compression" becomes more apparent.
What if I wanted to make the nose and the ears about the same size?
I'd need to change my perspective.
Now both trash cans take up roughly the same amount of space in the frame. They are still the same distance from each other. But from this perspective, they are both about the same distance away from the lens.
And now, let's magnify this perspective.
When you magnify a perspective, you magnify everything in the photo. The house behind is bigger. The light in the far background is bigger. Everything looks more orthographic. More two dimensional. And so it has that "compressed" perspective.
And because the perspective is from farther away, the percentage distance from the lens is much smaller. The black trash bin went from being 200% farther from the lens to 10% farther from the lens. The distance and geometry become less exaggerated.
Now let's line up all of the trash bins from both near and far perspectives and magnify them the same amount.
Look at that cute little guy.
How can we use this knowledge in a practical way?
By changing your mental model to perspective rather than the focal length of the lens, you can take control of how much perspective distortion you allow in your photos.
Let's use the humble selfie as our example.
Smartphones typically have a main camera with a wider field of view. And when you fill the frame with a face, you may get some unflattering perspective distortion.
I know that this distortion is not caused by the lens. It is caused by the camera being really close to my face.
So if I hold the camera farther away and change nothing else...
My face looks less distorted. However, it is taking up a much smaller area of the frame. But since modern smartphones have pretty good detail, I can just crop. I can magnify this farther perspective.
And when you compare the exact same framing from the near and far perspective...
The only variable I changed was extending my arm. It's the same wide angle lens.
You'll notice that the farther perspective made my head look bigger. I have a big head, that's fine. But this demonstrates another common photography fallacy. It is often said that 85mm lenses are the best for headshots and portraits. The idea is that compressing facial features is more flattering. But if someone has a big noggin, a telephoto lens may actually exaggerate their cranial prowess.
For people with larger or rounder heads, you may need to test different perspectives—different distances—to find a balance between compressing facial features and not exaggerating their head. 50mm might be more flattering for them.
I think photos of myself with a magnified distant perspective overwhelm people with the size of my dome and the luxuriousness of my mane.
At 85mm, the camera has to be farther away and it gives that imposing orthographic effect.
But at 50mm, I think my head feels a bit less... Megamind.
If you have a small or slender face, you may look best at 100mm or 200mm—because longer lenses force the camera to be farther away.
You can test what perspective works best for your head shape and facial features. But try not to think of it in millimeters. Think about how far away the camera is. This works even with a smartphone. You just place the camera at different distances, crop all the photos so your head has the same framing, and figure out which distance flatters you the most.
And then if a photographer is taking your picture and they seem too close or too far away, you can nudge them to the appropriate distance. And that distance will dictate what lens they need.
I hope this perspective of perspective gave you perspective on how to think about perspective.
My health has not been great and so I was working on this post since October. But it feels good to finally have it published. Hopefully you don't mind if I shove it back into the timeline to give it another chance with the algorithmic gods.
Some additional perspectives on perspective...
Perspective is not just a technical decision. It can be used artistically as well.
A close perspective gives the viewer a sense of intimacy. As if they are occupying the same space as the subject.
The lens has a wide field of view, but the photo is taken quite close and your perception feels that subconsciously due to the geometric cues.
What I call "common perspective" is based on the distance we are most comfortable when interacting with other humans.
When people say a 50mm lens is closest to the human eye, they are actually talking about this socially accepted distance. Our eyes have a wider field of view—so it isn't that our eyes match a 50mm, but rather the perspective the lens must use to fill the frame with a person's face matches our common comfortable perspective.
For headshots, photographers will typically move a little farther back than the common perspective and then use a slightly telephoto lens to magnify it. This still gives an intimate feel while flattening facial features and flattering proportions.
As I mentioned, it is important to consider head size and shape when using this farther portrait perspective. For big heads it can help to move closer and zoom out a bit. For slender faces you may want to move farther back and zoom in.
A far perspective with a wide field of view gives a sense of the environment. The space the subject occupies becomes a secondary character in the composition.
A distant perspective that is magnified can create an "observer" effect. As if the subject is being viewed from afar. This is great when you want to give the composition a feeling of isolation.
This is also why super telephoto paparazzi pictures can sometimes feel extra unsettling or invasive.
You can use perspective distortion to play with exaggerated size and geometry. A close perspective with a wide field of view can create some really fun and creative compositions.
And another cool perspective effect is to shoot from a low angle. This is often how "power poses" are photographed. You angle the camera slightly upward from below the subject's eyeline and it gives a sense that they are towering over you.
This can be subtle...
Or exaggerated...
In summary...
Close perspective is intimate.
Common perspective is comfortable.
Portrait perspective is flattering.
Far perspective with wide field of view is environmental.
Far perspective magnified is isolating.
Ultra distorted perspective can be fun and creative.
Low perspective can give a sense of power.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Time loop fic with lime as the protagonist. Very little changes cause they’re already fucking nuts, but now they’re also throwing handfuls of salt at Blue every ten minutes and no one knows why
Time loop fic with lime as the protagonist. Very little changes cause they’re already fucking nuts, but now they’re also throwing handfuls of salt at Blue every ten minutes and no one knows why
tangentwithtanner
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
