Do Photos Make You Look Fatter? There are various sayings out there about cameras adding pounds and making you look fat, things that may not be too desirable for a photographer taking pictures of a client. Are they true and if so, what is the technical basis behind this phenomenon? This article will answer the question, “do photos make you look fatter ?” once and for all and also go into how to solve the problem. When you use a camera to capture an image of yourself or another person, various factor affect the way the subject person will appear in the photograph. These include the lenses used, focal length, barrel distortion, lighting, angle and certain camera settings in addition to how the person poses. Some of these factors may make you look fatter than you are in reality, while others may just make you look different. Let’s get into the details. Focal length We all know that camera lenses can be classified into wide angle and telephoto, telephoto being the ones that magnify your subject greatly and wide angle being the ones that “zoom out” to get much more of the scene into the photo, up to the point of making it feel like you stepped back from where you are actually standing. Most beginners do not use telephoto lenses for photographing people, while professional portrait photographers may use lenses of 85mm or longer. Instead, beginners use the equivalent of a wide angle lens such as in a cell phone, for selfies etc. These lenses actually stretch parts of the subject/person that are closer to camera making them appear larger. An 85mm or 100mm lens in portraits has a good balance and does not exaggerate anything, unlike an extreme 24mm lens or a 1000mm one. Some professionals do use 300mm lenses for shooting people as it is better than a wide angle. Here is a really cool animation to show how different lenses can distort a person’s image. Lenses Lenses come in all shapes and sizes as well as build quality and distortions, aberrations etc. The common saying if you get what you pay for. A cheap lens from a barely known manufacturer (and not one of the top ones including Nikon, Canon or Sigma) may produce more than one type of distortion. You should always learn the specs of a lens and known issues from the manufacturers website or even a site like kenrockwell.com If you have various lenses you should try them all shooting the same person and see how differently they depict the subject. Lenses with smaller focal lengths actually exaggerate the middle of the image. Distortion One thing we need to keep in mind is that we live in a 3D world and what the camera does is it projects that 3D world (including us) onto a 2D surface. This in itself distorts reality when creating the image. Barrel distortion occurs in a lens that makes straight lines appear curved and is an extreme form of distortion. This makes a person appear larger than they are. Barrel distortion is common in zoom lenses with short focal lengths and wide angle prime lenses. The reason it happens is the image is being squeezed into an image sensor that is smaller than the field of view of the lens, in this case a wide angle one. To check for barrel distortion point your camera at lines that you know are parallel in real life and see if they are deformed to look like a barrel and curved in the camera. Distance Another thing you need to keep in mind is distance from the camera to the person. Whether you realize it or not, taking a selfie with your hand creates distortion because your arm is only so long. Your face will look wider in this case due to the very limited distance. This is why professional photographers never get too close to your face. They always stay back when shooting portraits and use correspondingly long telephoto lenses to bring the subject closer. Camera settings One camera setting that affects how you look is the zoom. For example when using a phone to shoot a selfie you decide to include as much as you can in the photo, casually sliding the zoom scale to 0.5x. This creates a wide angle distortion I mentioned. Even the screen on the back of your camera for playback can distort your image depending how you set the settings ( ex. fill screen). Lighting You have to keep in mind that when you look in the mirror you usually have regular home lighting affecting how you see yourself. In a photograph, however, the lighting varies based on your location (outdoors, indoors), time of day, atmospheric conditions, etc. Lighting in photographs is often dramatic and often controlled to make extreme modifications to the way a person appears. A pro photographer can make you look thinner or fatter based on the location and types of lights. When the world is converted from 3D to 2D through a photograph, some lighting is actually lost. As you are probably aware, shadows on the face make people appear slimmer. Any introduction of darkness will do this. Angle Even the angle at which you shoot your subject will have an effect on how they appear. If you shoot them from higher up, they will appear slimmer, and if you shoot from below, fatter. It is much more complex though, as positioning to emphasize features such as a jaw line may surpass the effect of a higher up/ lower angle. Here is an interesting comparison of how different a person can look based on camera angles. Mirror Effect There is one more thing we need to mention in how you see yourself which may make you feel like you feel different in an image from a camera. In a photograph, you appear exactly as other people see you. This is not how you ever see yourself (unless you are…

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