How Different Camera Lenses Can Make You Look Fatter

Megalith

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I’m underweight, so going with a much longer focal length is a no-brainer for me—but really, it seems like a bad idea to do portraiture with anything shorter than a 50mm lens. Less distortion aside, longer lenses let you shoot farther away from your subject, which generally makes them much more comfortable.

There’s a combination of factors that make you look fat. The focal length of the camera can flatten out a person’s features thus making them look much bigger in comparison. Barrel distortion—that is, when straight lines look like they’re curving out because of the nature of the lens—can also make a person’s face look more plump than usual.
 
Interesting to see the the full range from 19 through 200 on that second set of photos. But seems like once you get above 100mm it doesn't have much of an effect. I would be curious as to what camera they are using.
 
If my memory serves right, I was reading about this same article on the photography sub and apparently what is not mentioned is that the camera distance is also being effected each time they're switching to a different focal length, hence the dramatic difference in the look in the face each time.
 
The wider the lens (lower focal length) the bigger close things will look, compared to things in the background.

Thus if you want an as neutral look as possible, you use a longer focal length. This is why 90-110mm prime lenses are often considered the perfect portrait lenses. This does mean you have to stand a little further away, especially on a crop sensor camera, but they do result in the best portraits.

This is also why using cell phone cameras result in terrible portraits, because they try to make up for their tiny sensors, by using very short focal length lenses, and thus there is a lot of distortion.
 
This whole discussion is only crucial if you are walking closer or farther way to frame the person the same size in the picture for each lens. If you are at the same distance from the person and take all your pictures, all the lenses will effectively look the same, when you crop the face.

One interesting thing is: Look at the "size" of his nose. Wide at 20mm and progressively getting smaller, and more fitting for his face, as the MMs increase. Shows why you don't want to take a picture of a person right up next to there face. Also why "selfies" look silly.
 
This whole discussion is only crucial if you are walking closer or farther way to frame the person the same size in the picture for each lens. If you are at the same distance from the person and take all your pictures, all the lenses will effectively look the same, when you crop the face.

One interesting thing is: Look at the "size" of his nose. Wide at 20mm and progressively getting smaller, and more fitting for his face, as the MMs increase. Shows why you don't want to take a picture of a person right up next to there face. Also why "selfies" look silly.

A lot of people intentionally take advantage of this effect.

They their wide angle phones up above their head and it makes their heads appear larger than they should and bodies appear smaller than they should.

They feel it makes them look less fat, when in fact it just makes them look distorted.
 
Photographer here. So while the 100mm is popular, 200mm is used to compress the background out. There's a style of photography out there that using a 200mm will blur the background out more to give it that cinematic effect for headshots. I use this method quite a bit. The images in the OP give an example but there is no posing to the image which really amplifies the effect of the focal range. For example, Dylan Patrick uses the image below at f/3.2, ISO 100, at 200mm. With good posing, the subject has an accurate representation of how they look. The wide images will really distort the head which is not desirable in headshot photography.

923f31023eefeca69158ce6c318b5eca.jpg
 
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