The typical iPhone / Android Lens is around 20mm to 35mm. To get an optimal shot of your features, you need above 100mm Lens, this is why you look so different in SELFIES than real life.
Did you know the iPhone Focal Length Lens (mm) makes you look ugly in SELFIES?
This isn't really true. If anyone is a nerd, I can make a my take about this topic but you need a wide focal length in order to have an effective selfie camera.
When you have a wide angle lens, you introduce distortion, but it's very predictable and algorithms to fix this almost on the fly have existed for many years. The iPhone does a good job at minimizing distortion. Also it's way more sophisticated on the newer ones than Android.
The new iPhones use ai to essentially photoshop every picture you take. It's very detailed work that it does extremely well. You'd be hard pressed to find a better selfie camera than what Apple has right now.
The difference between a 15mm lens and a 20mm lens in this context is almost negligible compared to everything else the iPhone does like fix lighting, get colors accurately, shoot a sharp, clean video. The color science and processing is also really good. Also, sensor size changes the effective focal length.
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4 paragraphs of NOTHING. I'm witnessing the distortion with my own eyes with this video above. It clearly looks much better after 100mm focal length lens.
"Barrel distortion will also occur if you are standing too close to your subject with a wide angle lens or a zoom lens at the wide end (ie. 24mm). Whatever body part is closest to the camera, it will look abnormally large! Heads, eyes, noses or limbs will look pronounced and awkward."
Right, so just like I said before and it even talks about this in one of the first paragraphs of the article, you can correct for lens distortion with post processing.
This process involves coming up with a "lens profile" where someone takes pictures of a grid and measures the distortion with a special graph. The graph has known dimensions when placed from a lens at a certain distance so after entering the focal length into software, you can calculate a displacement map that counteracts the distortions.
This is what needs to be done in big Hollywood movies whenever there's something being shot handheld in front of a greenscreen. Like in most marvel movies for example.
This process isn't perfect. If you're paying attention, you can still notice artifacts but as a normal viewer it's usually difficult to tell.
Like I said, there's a difference between a phone camera and a professional camera. The iPhone has AI on it to correct for these things as well as do things like masking out parts of the image to make color edits.
There's also another thing this video doesn't take into account which has a little to do with how focal length is calculated.
All lenses are rated with a focal length based on a 35mm sensor. There are many different sensor sizes. Such as APS-C, 70mm, large format, ARRI 65.
What they leave out in this video is that this effect is the result of the relationship in sensor size and lens focal length. Phone camera lenses are also a little different in that they're made for a specific sensor size.
Yeah - Those "phone lenses" are very wide-angle so users can shoot selfies with 3-4 people at only arm's length. So those "portrait photos" make you look like a stick or a blimp! I shot 35mm (film!) cameras- and now 35mm equivalent digitals- for part of my living in the graphics industry. My "go-to" portrait lens would be my 105mm. I also carry a 70-240 zoom in addition to the standard equipment 55mm/f 1.4 lens.
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Are you a pro photog. ? Would you say that after 135mm it's pointless to go higher to get the utmost quality of shots? I'm thinking about becoming a photog myself
Yeah, part of my gig for the last (holy crap) 55 years!!! For portraits? Yes, stay in the 100-135mm range (in 35mm lens equivalents). 100 mm is enough length to drop the parallax and "bubble-boob" effect of a wide angle. If you go much longer, the lens gets cumbersome, and you keep moving further from the subject, maybe "losing the moment" with him/her. If you get a longer zoom, or even fixed-length lens (es), be sure you get a high enough pixel count to support the (somewhat inherent) loss of quality. When I'd go on trips, I'd just put on the 70/240 and leave it on, slap an 81A Skylight filter - or a polarizing filter for water shots- and I'd be good to go.
yup. i know, cause i do hobby fotography. but of course this can't be avoided, cause in order to get a proper selfi from that short distance, you need a very short focal range, which incidentally makes you look like shit xD
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But it looks like even at a distance, if you don't have the right "mm" focal length lens, you still look like shit, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems 135mm should be the MINIMUM to really get a good quality selfie with all the dimensions of the person showing properly. I always wondered why I looked shittier in pics than real life and now it makes sense, especially on these iPhones which only have 35mm MAX focal length lenses.
Also focal length doesn't tell the whole story. You also gotta consider crop. Focal length is always considered in relation to a full frame sensor. So if you have a smaller apsc sensor, you gotta multiply the given focal length by 0.6, cause you have a crop of the full frame due to the smaller sensor. Phone sensors are tiny so it's likely something ridiculous like 12mm focal length equivalent in a phone.
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