An interesting story at the CBC about some new digital cameras equipped with a "slimming" feature. If you read it, you get down to the end of the story where some Sociology Prof nitwit starts expressing all these "concerns" about the cameras.
Apparently the woman has never heard of Photoshop - I guess that's understandable, after all she is a Professor at the University of Winnipeg, not exactly what you would call a technological capital in Canada. Basically all the cameras do internally is change the aspect ratio of the photo slightly - which also leads to the enhancement (and I use THAT term very loosely) being called the "pointy-head" feature. Anyone can make a picture look thinner, there are lots of freeware solutions out there to let you edit pictures and most cameras have at least one piece of image-manipulation software bundled with them. If someone has issues with their body and wants to make themselves look different, that have been able to do it since digital photography began. Heck, they could have done it in a dark room back when people had to have film processed and developed, it doesn't take much manipulation using your enlarger to adjust a photo's aspect ratio either. Perhaps her concern is that now it is "easier"? Maybe I'm too conceited for my own good, but as a photographer myself I have never considered taking a good-quality picture "easy", and having such a feature on cameras might (although I doubt it) reduce some of the downright AWFUL pictures some people take. If someone has body image issues then the least of the concerns about them should be whether or not they can take a picture of themselves looking thinner. Maybe she'd like to ban funhouse mirrors, as well?
If you aren't even sure that the old chestnut about the camera adding 10 lbs is accurate, well, it is. It is simply a question of how an image is interpretted - where your eyes see in 3 dimensions and you can discern that a person is not flat, the camera cannot. Without taking the time to do a lot of lighting work to enhance and show shadows and depth, a photo more or less simply interprets all the points of you the same - and making you look much wider and therefore heavier. It explains why some people are notoriously unphotogenic too - they have features that just don't interpret when placed on a single plane. Often portrait photographers take shots of you sitting around a 45 degree angle to the camera to help reduce this effect. The foreshortening effect on an angle helps demonstrate the real distance across your body, rather than forcing your eye to (poorly) interpolate how close or far the center of your thorax is from the point of the hip or shoulder as happens in a straight-on shot.
Confused? So am I. Just understand that a camera is taking something 3D and making it 2D and without a skilled photographer, you're going to look heavier. Try taking a picture of a car straight from the front, and compare it to what you can see actually looking at the car - sometimes they don't even look like the same vehicle. The camera adds 2 tonnes, man! It turned my Cavalier into a Hummer!
