Power of the press
Press photographers influence the public's perception of politicians and women simply by changing their camera angles, research has shown.
Shooting a picture from below makes a person appear more dominant and powerful, while the reverse is true for an image taken looking down from above.
A study found that powerful individuals are consistently more likely to be portrayed from below.
Powerless individuals are frequently presented by an angle shot from above - and this is especially true of women appearing in adverts, magazines and newspapers.
The findings suggest the way people are photographed reinforces social stereotypes, such as the view that women should not be leaders, say the scientists.
Study leader Dr Steffen Giessner, from the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, said: "Such simple associations of power and angle of shot do not take place in a social vacuum.
"Rather, context related to power (such as within organisations, or portraying the 100 most important people in the world) easily trigger our thinking about power.
"As a result we may consciously or unconsciously use cues to show the attribution of power in a picture."
Weird Science Factoid: The head in a normal pencil would draw a line of 35 miles.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
