snapshots and image distortion: photo advice?

[Tenly]

 Im not sure if its my settings or what but when I try to screen shoot anything the view is simply distorted. but Ive noted that other folks taking glorious pics dont seem to be having the same problem.

I dont know how to fix the distortion. For example I want to take a closeup of my avatar face and the closer I get the more distortion.

tips n tricks?

[Rolig Loon]

The trick is not to set your camera's focus so close to your face.  The view that you see is a perspective, not a flat orthographic view, so you will always see images distorted toward the center of your screen.  It's most obvious the closer you get to something.  So, if you want a flatter image, back up.  Take your photo, export it to your hard drive, and manipulate it in Photoshop or GIMP to get the size you want.

[Whirly Fizzle]

For close up shots of your avatar face, you want to zoom in the camera view using CTRL+0.

CTRL+0 - zooms in

CTRL+8 - zooms out

CTRL+9 - resets zoom.

For example:

Here is a shot taken by zooming on on avatar face using the mousewheel to zoom in. Note the distortion.

In this shot I zoomed in using CTRL+0

 

[ChinRey]

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Whirly Fizzle wrote:

For close up shots of your avatar face, you want to zoom in the camera view using CTRL+0.

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If you want the perspective to be as realistic as possible, click CTRL-0 two or three times. You still get serious distortion towards the edges of the screen view but that shouldn't matter for a protrait where you only use the center of the screen.

[Chic Aeon]

Most bloggers (all that I know) take LARGE (that is 5000 pixels or better) shots using the FULL SCREEN (don't let the viewer crop it for you) then crop as needed and resize in a graphics program.

 

I good close up photo doesn't really need to be THAT close (although I have very good luck doing it that way also). You can simply crop it afterwards.

 

If you computer is less than hefty, it makes it harder. That is a give.

 

Good luck.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Here's a page that discusses selection of focal length for portrait work, complete with examples of various focal lengths on the same subject...

http://improvephotography.com/29737/best-focal-length-portraits/

For portraits, you don't want to have the camera any closer to the face than you'd typically be yourself. It's a very common mistake to think you must get closer to people to do a portrait than you would for a whole body shot. That's just not true. We live most of our lives considerably more than arm's length away from other people, so taking a portrait at arm's length won't produce a natural looking face. This explains why selfies look the way they do - wrong. In the extreme, very close in with a very wide angle (approaching fisheye) lens, we get those cute big nose puppy shots...



For a head shot portrait, you want the face to fill a good portion of the frame. Even people using RL cameras with zoom lenses will be tempted to move in close to make that happen, but you really must back away and then zoom the lens in to compose the shot. Portrait lens are actually low power telephoto lenses (100mm focal length @ 35mm film equivalent). As Whirly and Chinrey suggest (and for the reasons Rolig gives) you want to zoom in a few Ctrl-0 clicks from the default (Ctrl-9) wide-angle view.

If you use Firestorm, I recommend you drag the Phototools Camera toolbar button to your toolbar. That gives you better and deeper control over the camera view angle (zoom). Unfortunately, SL camera controls don't correspond to RL camera controls, so you'll have to experiment to get the results you desire. Drag the view angle slider all the way to the right and cam around a bit. I think you'll quickly see SL in a new way. You may never go back to shooting at the default view angle.