WT Forums

Get Better Portraits by Turning Your Camera Upside Down?

Tue Dec 19, 2006 4:32PM EST

File under oddity: Website Digital Camera University says that you can take better portraits (that is, pictures of people's faces) if you turn your digital camera upside down.

Why? It has to do with the location of the flash: Since it's mounted above the lens it creates slight shadows by the way the light bounces off the lines on your subject's face, which makes wrinkles and blemishes look more noticeable than they should. By turning the camera upside down, the light (now coming from beneath the lens) hits the face at a slightly different angle, creating a slightly different image. That's the theory, anyway.

Looking at the close-up on the site's sample images you can indeed see the difference the writer is talking about if you look at the lines around the model's eyes fairly closely. But I tried it myself to make sure this wasn't a hoax. When shooting an adult face, it was very clear that the upside-down tip did indeed reduce the appearance of lines. The crease around the mouth was noticeably less visible in the upside-down shot I tried than in the regular portrait. However, there was one unintended side effect: The upside-down shot made her face look much redder than it should have, for reasons I can't explain.

I also tried the trick on my four-year-old daughter, but since she is not yet jaded and beaten down by the cruel world, she doesn't have facial lines. I couldn't tell the difference between the side-by-side shots of her.

As the linked site itself notes, the effect is subtle and difficult to see, but it does exist. Is it something I'll do regularly? Probably not, unless repeated portraits keep turning out badly. But it's a neat little party trick that you ought to try at least once when snapping a shot of grandma.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/10464

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