 Louise Panther |
how to shoot faces close up without being distorte when im shooting either macro or just close up I seem to to get a rounded version of the subjects face. quite distorted from there real image. what am I doing wrong? I want a true version of what I see. Thanks alot
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Alan N. Marcus |
Hi Louise, Chances are, most folks go through life paying little attention to perspective. You already know that things close appear bigger, things far away appear smaller. Railroad tracks and highways converge in the distance. When the umpire stands nose–to-nose with an unruly player, he sees an overly enlarged nose mounted on a sphere sporting tiny ears. Facial proportions are not on the ump’s mind. Photographers are not so lucky, we must not only notice, we need to take countermeasures. People have a preconceived mental picture of what they look like. This image is the one they see daily in the make-up/shaving mirror. It’s an overblown view. How often have you seen before and after pictures showing the results of cosmetic surgery? Most often you will find the changes minuscule whereas that individual views the changes as a marvelous. Thus the cosmetic industry flourishes. Knowing this, a photographer can make portraits that please i.e. pictures that sell. Failure to heed yields comments like “I don’t photograph well” or “the camera sure lies”. The countermeasure is simple – step back. When the camera is too close the nose reproduces too large and the ears come out too small. Step back as you compose a portrait. Distance lessens facial distortions. Stated another way, a lengthy subject-to-camera distance minimizes the differences; nose-to- camera vs. ears-to-camera, distortion becomes negligible. Using a longer than normal lens forces increased camera to subject distance. The normal lens gives real life perspective. Each format (film/frame size) is allocated a focal length that produces normal perspective. This will be a lens with a focal length about equal to the diagonal measure of the frame. For a 35mm film camera this is about 50mm. For a 6x6 this is about 80mm. A full frame digital spots a frame size that is the same as the 35mm film camera. The more popular digitals sport an imaging chip that is 60% smaller, thus normal for them is about 30mm focal length. It is commonly taught that if your camera is equipped with lens focal length that hovers around 2.5 times normal, portrait prospective will be normalized meaning the resulting image more closely duplicates the prospective seen by the subject in his/her make-up/shaving mirror. For a 35mm camera that translates to 105mm or longer. For the typical digital that’s works out to be 70mm or more. The point of this writing: To yield normalized facial features, step back. A long lens forces this act. If you can find out or calculate your chip’s diagonal measure that is a good thing to know. The 2.5 times diagonal for portrait focal length is a good rule to follow. Hollywood takes this one step further, generally they uses 3x normal for close-up shots. Photography is both an art and a science thus you are free to forge your own path and use any focal length your heart’s desires. Alan Marcus
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Ariel Lepor |
I know Alan really knows a lot about this stuff. I didn't read his long answer, which probably has all the info you need, but I'm just going to give what I think is a short answer. You are seeing barrel distortion. It is caused by the camera and lens. Generally, wide-angle lens produce more barrel distortion. If you use an SLR, you can get a better lens. If you use a fixed-lens camera, you need to research (dcresource.com) to see how bad the distortion is for a camera. There are programs to correct this even after the shot has been taken. Helicon Filter is one which I use, and it's pretty good. I think these two are also good, but I haven't used them: PTLens, ShiftN.
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Alan N. Marcus |
Perspective distortion is related to lens focal length and subject distance. Short focus wide angle lenses present geometric distortion solely due to the large angle of view. The effect is often confused with barrel distortion which is caused poor lens figure i.e. misshaped lens.
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Christopher A. Vedros |
Alan is correct. The short answer is to step back and use your zoom. Chris A. Vedros
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Ariel Lepor |
Yeah, you should shoot differently. Zooming in often fixes problems that I've seen. The pictures can still be fixed with other programs.
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Christopher A. Walrath |
A good portrait lens focal length is in the 80-120 range for 35mm/D-SLR, 110-170 in medium format. You are about 10-12 feet away from the subject, not crowding them but still in range to communicate well with them. Not to short a lens to get the distortion. Not to long to flatten the features out.
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Louise Panther |
Hey guys thanks for the response, it was a lot faster than I expected very impressed! Yes I need to step back and zoom in, thanks for ideas and thoughts. quick question to Ariel L what are the programmes used to correct the photos I have already taken. Thank you all so much Louise p New Zealand
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Debby A. Tabb |
Yes they are, But Alan and Chris are trying to help point you in the right direction with the correct answer. It is more in the behalf of the Photographer as they are profecting thier trade or starting out to relize that shooting to print is much smarter then shooting with the idea that you can go back to corrct. I tried in the past to post in my Gallery "Untouched" work, so other can see that you can cut WAY down on editing time(if any) if you just make some simple(as this one is) corrections before the shot. As you get into large sessions or Weddings ect. you can find yourself with up to a weeks worth of editing time strapped to a computer. ** I had a friend I worked with in film for years, shotly after we both went digital we did a wedding together. With a attitude of " I'm digital, I can fix it all in PS" she shot her half of this wedding. 2 weeks later I still did not have her work to submit to the client. I hope this helps, **“You don’t take a photograph... you create it.” **The photographer knows that there is a great difference between seeing a scene and producing a photographic equivalent.
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Ariel Lepor |
Well, don't take me as saying that you don't need to shoot well to start with - that is very important. As far as programs to fix the already-distorted pictures, I'm sure Photoshop (or at least Photoshop with a plugin) can fix this. Do a Google search on distortion photo software and I'm sure you can get all sorts of different programs. But I mainly use Helicon Filter. Helicon isn't mainly for distortions, but it can undo and change distortions pretty well. For this kind of distortion, you only have one or two sliders to correct this in Helicon, but some more dedicated programs are probably more comprehensive. Helicon has a free version, so might as well test it out. P.S. Re fast response time: It is a result of us being real people trying to help others, rather than some tech support guy in India.
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Michael A. Bielat |
+1 on the move back and zoom
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