(Y’all see why I am a photographer and not a painter, I’d imagine.) The diagonal lines/pie slices show what a wide-angle lens can see of a scene, vs what a longer lens can see, when the camera is in the exact same position. Following?Įx: Here is a really professional and 100% scientific rendition of what a wide-angle vs not-so-wide angle lens can “see” when you take a photo. If these are fixed length lenses (they can’t zoom) and you want to change how much of the scene the camera can capture, you need to physically walk toward or away from the subject. A longer lens will cut out the stuff on the sides, and just capture a smaller slice of the scene in front of you. That’s really nice for taking landscapes and capturing a lot of the scene. See, a wide-angle lens will allow you to see a larger slice of the scene in front of you. It’s just a short-cut way to talk about the phenomenon. And that’s sorta true, but not entirely true. So how can we understand how a smart phone camera is distorting our face, and can we use that to our advantage/disadvantage?įirst, remember it’s the distance, not the lens width – It’s a common belief that selfies are distorted because cell phone cameras use really wide angle lenses. So Why and How does a Selfie Cause Distortion? Remember this – anything close to the camera is going to look larger, and anything farther from the camera is going to look smaller, and the brain won’t correct for it in a photo like it would in person. So we know perspective is different in photos. (BTW: In-camera forced perspective is how Peter Jackson made a good chunk of The Lord of the Rings and you should look that up because it’s very cool to see behind the scenes.) This phenomenon/technique is called forced perspective.Įx: Yes, I know that the model’s hand is not larger than her head when she extends it toward me in real life. Our brains are always making allowances for spatial relationships between objects. But a camera (mono-vision, just the one “eye”) can change that, making things seem out of proportion to each other. A camera is not like human eyes, which can view an entire scene in stereo and use the brain to process it and take relative distance/perspective into account. The camera doesn’t just (as a friend of mine asked me) “record what’s there.” Far from it, the camera distorts everything, all the time, and the photographer does too – that’s our job. Every photo in existence is altered and constrained by many factors, including the camera itself, the focal length of the lens we use, lighting and posing of the subject and the perspective from which the photo was taken. (Nor would we want that, even if it did exist.) All photos are lies, distortions of the truth, and that goes double triple for selfies. You have to understand that as a professional portrait photographer I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “real” photo of a person-a photo that shows the human face or form exactly as it is. (If you’re a techy/camera person and you want to “Well, actually…” me about anything in this article, don’t.) All Photographs are Lies I have tried my best to explain this in lay terms without too much detail, but please do ask if something isn’t clear. So I thought I’d do a demo here and explain a little bit about how cameras distort the face, so you can stop fretting, go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live your best life, and not worry about your nose really being that big, because it for sure is not. I work with people all the time to help them create photography that shows them at their best, so I was sorry to see recent articles that talked about people wanting plastic surgery because they think their nose looks too large in selfies, and they didn’t understand that selfies are not accurate reflections of reality. In our looks-obsessed world, our appearance is a real currency, and it’s only natural that we should want to experiment with it, and make sure that we control it as much as we are able. Selfies allow us to examine and re-create our own image in a way that we feel comfortable with. Selfies have the power to make us feel great, or – on the days where we can’t find our angle – make us feel rotten. No, a selfie is a carefully composed photo, in all the best ways. Not weirdly lit, from an awkward angle and snorting at a joke like the photos other people take of us. The lure of the selfie is the enticing idea that we might be seen by the rest of the world in the same way that we see ourselves. At the right angle, in the right light, with the right expression.
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