Get Better Portraits by Turning Your Camera Upside Down?

[NicoleRussell]

Get Better Portraits by Turning Your Camera Upside Down?

Tue Dec 19, 2006 4:32PM EST
See Comments (344)
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.



Get Better Portraits by Turning Your Camera Upside Down? : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech

[Sleepy_FF]

neat!!!

[JuliusSqueezer]

Wrong! Use a reflector (gold if you want warm tones or silver if you want more contrast) and fill in shadows under the nose and eye sockets. If the flash is under the lens, and the person's head is turned even a bit or since most of the point and shoots have the flash above and to the side, you wil get an annoying nose shadow flipped up unnaturally to the side and above. But....doesn't hurt to try it. Just don't expect anything spectacular. Even the pros and advanced hobbyists now and then set up their studio lightings down low seeking new perspective...and ALWAYS get blasted on the critiques. The idea of artificial light is to light the photo and simulate natural light. In a "portrait" there is seldom call for abstract. Most people won't know right off why the photo is unpleasing but lighting coming from anywhere other than above in a portrait will not create a natural effect. Actually...builtin flash doesn't either. It's too close to the lens and fires at too much the same angle you are shooting anyway...that's why I rarely ever use any builtin flash.

[NicoleRussell]

I had a portrait done of the girls in NY in which the photographer used a mirror under their faces and it looked so wonderful I ordered a huge copy for my dining room...would't that be light coming from below?

[JuliusSqueezer]

Not really. The majority of light still comes from above. The amount that is reflected up isn't as much so it's "fill" Even in nature this happens. Again...using fill flash or a reflector down low and bouncing some of the light back up...key word there is "some" to fill in shadows without creating new ones going the wrong way is one of the huge differences between amature and professionally made portraits.

[JuliusSqueezer]

Studio lighting 101 by me

For you guys with SLRs looking to set up studio lighting and are experienced with metering with a flash meter, here's my basic setup for most portraits...If you aren't into this stuff, don't read any of this...It will bore you to tears.

I shoot usually at f8 so my mainlight which is bounced into a silver umbrella and back out through a white scrim (softbox) is metered at f8. The rest of the lights are set either hotter or cooler than f8 depending on what effect I want them to have but they do not have any bearing on what the camera's aperature is set to. Only the mainlight dictates aperature. The main is angled slightly down from a little above eye level and spreads the light out wide enough to evenly light full body shots. I set it almost center but slightly off to the side. For fill, I use a big folding reflector (bogen triflector) to bounce light back up. For the shadowed areas that are being filled, Ideally these places should meter about one stop back from the main. You want a bit of shadow there but not so harsh so if you are shooting at f8, you want your shadowed areas to meter at 5.6 give or take a bit but definatly not hotter than f8! If it's perfectly even with the main, your photo will be flat and lifeless (no sense of depth) Most of this bounced flash does not come from the main light but from the hair light that is positioned directly above the subject pointed straight down through a small soft box. I meter this light also at f8 or maybe even at f11 for dark hair or cut it back to about 5.6 or 4 for blondes or frosted grey so their heads don't glow. Putting a little light on the hair seperates them nicely from the background. The back light can be set pretty much at anything from slightly hotter (f11 gives a decent color saturation with gels with a nice gradient if using a black background) metering so that the back light is 2 stops hotter (f16) will blow out any wrinkles in the background (assuming you are setting it back out of the range of your depth of field/focus from the subject) and give very bright color if shooting it through gels.

For those of you who have an idea about what an fstop is but are confused at how metering a smaller aperature gives more light...remember the main light dictates the camera aperature. The lens doesn't change because of what the other lights meter at. So if your lens is set at f8 and a certain portioned meters at f16, you are overexposing that area by 2 stops. If an area meters at 5.6 but you are shooting at f8, that area is being underexposed by one stop...thus creating and controling your highlights, backlighting and shadows all the while perfectly exposing the main subject.


So now you ask...well in the samples the author provided, why wasn't there an upflipped nose shadow or otherwise odd lighting? First, his examples are poor. There is a noted difference of exposure overall. For a fair comparison, both should have been exposed the same. Second, he shot outside which made his camera flash a fill flash. His main light source was the sun. If he tries it inside, he won't be happy with the results at all.