say “fat” – why the camera adds 10 pounds

Posted on MSN news

By Michelle Tsai
Posted Thursday, Feb. 22, 2007, at 6:49 PM ET

For weeks, Hollywood stars have lip-plumped and lasered themselves in preparation for the red carpet photographers at the Academy Awards. Celebrities have many reasons to fear the camera: Just look at Tyra Banks, who recently blamed bad camera angles after tabloids caught the former model sporting flab in a bathing suit and dubbed her “Thigh-ra Banks.” So why do cameras add 10 pounds?Bad lighting, mostly. The flat, even illumination on the red carpet makes it hard for the camera to capture dimension, unlike in a photo shoot with flattering soft lights. Cast from an angle, light creates shadows that sculpt the face and body by hiding unwanted flesh. Softer lights can hide wrinkles and smooth out the skin for women, while harsher lights on male faces exaggerate lines for a chiseled look. Without the aid of shadows, however, light exposes the imperfections of the face and body and makes the resulting image bigger and flatter. That’s why everyone avoids white dresses—which cast fewer shadows under even lighting—except the thinnest actresses, like Nicole Kidman.

The camera’s perspective—how objects in a two-dimensional field express depth—can also distort a person’s size. Telephoto lenses, which have a long focal length, compress the space between the foreground and the background, making distant objects appear closer. Up close, they shrink the distance from your nose to your ears, resulting in a diminished proboscis and more balanced features. (That’s why paparazzi use telephoto lenses—for flattery as well as magnification.) Wide angle lenses, which have a short focal length, do just the opposite, making a person in the center of the picture appear both wider and taller. At the extreme, these lenses can also make people at the outside edges of a group photo look fatter.

But a celebrity can look fat on camera even with ideal lighting and focal length. Distortions will be introduced any time you try to project a three-dimensional object onto the two-dimensional surface of a photograph. (Just compare globes with maps, which always make things look a little funny.) That’s one excuse for retouching celebrity photos. A few clicks of the mouse can draw in the waistline and add a few inches in height.

Bonus Explainer: Why is it sometimes hard to recognize ourselves in videos and photos? Because the image isn’t flipped. We’re most used to seeing our own bodies in the mirror, where our features are reversed left to right. It’s similar to how our voices sound unfamiliar and higher on a tape recording. We’re expecting to hear ourselves as we usually do, with the sounds we make traveling through the bones in our face to reach our ears.

Reason #1 to turn off your computer and go outside (when it’s not -8)

This APOD post has a MUCH better picture, and a great description. I strongly recommend you check it out. (in the words of tophster)

Jeff Moore

Check out Jeff’s portfolio. He was in Naperville the other day. Completely cool!!!!!

Jeff Moore

i’m switching

Taken from the Wall Street Journal Morning Edition 6-22-06

"This week, we reviewed the beta (or pre-release) version of a new photo-sharing Web site called Tabblo (www.tabblo.com), from Boston-based Tabblo Inc., that will be officially released on June 30. Tabblo differs from other Web-based sharing sites. It's a so-called "Web 2.0" service, meaning it functions like a software application, offering features like dragging and dropping and editing all on the same Web page, without the annoying constant reloading that characterizes so many photo sites.

Tabblo also puts special emphasis on presentation, allowing you to arrange your photos in collages and designs with descriptions, rather than as straightforward slideshows, so as to add a little flair and style to your photos. The company calls these photo montages "tabblos." If you really like the tabblo that you create, you can order high-quality printed posters of them in 11×17 inches for $10, or 8.5×11 inches for $8."

The process for building a tabblo is straightforward. Three tabs labeled View, Upload and Make at the top of the screen walk you through the steps. In View, you can see all of the tabblos that you've already made, as well as a list of those in your circle of friends. In Upload, we quickly added photos to our Tabblo accounts using Java uploader, one of five options offered by the site. Integrating your photos from Flickr.com — another photo-sharing site — is one of the five options, if you have an account.

The Edit Tabblo section was especially impressive. We easily dragged photos all around the screen, seeing which fit in the best places of our collage layout and automatically swapping out other images. It was smooth and quick, exactly like working in a full-blown program stored locally on a PC, instead of a Web site stored on a distant server.

When we moused over each photo, buttons and controls appeared. These included a Remove Picture button and four on-screen editing options in the top left of each image: Collapse, Scale & Pan, Show Effects and Rotate Photo. Scale & Pan was very useful, instantly showing a window in which we could zoom in or out and pan around the image. Show Effects altered the image to black and white, sepia, oil paint or negative style.

All of these changes took just a few seconds for each image — quite a switch from the constant refreshing and reloading of Web pages that are commonplace on other photo-sharing sites.

A box filled with more editing options is constantly present at the right of your screen, offering options for changing text colors, background colors and other settings. After tweaking to our heart's content, we continued on into the Share Tabblo section. Here, we could opt for our tabblo to be seen by anyone, just those in our circles, people we invited or just ourselves.

If your tabblo is set to Public or sent to someone using an invitation, those viewing it won't have to sign in. If the tabblo is sent to those in your circle, those people must sign in with their Tabblo account information, which they'll already have (by being in a circle). This week, Tabblo will introduce a shareable link which can be sent to others for use without login credentials."

 

something to add which wsj didn't cover – there are several upload options other than integrating a flickr account.  you can add a picasa plugin, install a java uploader, or a flash uploader for multiple photo uploads. otherwise there is the traditional browse and upload one photo at a time….

i just integrated it with my flickr account and it didn't add all of my photos.  must be a beta bug, but if i were to install a desktop tool i could add all photos whether they were on flickr or not

upload time is a bit on the slow side but other than that it's great