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5 Window Light Portrait Positions

I'm Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens. In this article, we’re going to show you how to set up the five lighting portrait positions using the window and how to control the light.

Why People Don’t Like Portraits of Themselves

Portrait photos are often disliked by the subject themselves. From the early formative years of grade school on into the advanced years of adulthood, the feeling of dislike of your own picture is universal. Yet it is not for vanity sake, nor is it to spare the shock of another from seeing self-assumed horrors. Assuming you are neither a narcissist nor a person with flawless perfection, you may simply be like the rest of the human race: there is real science behind the reason why you may not like your own photograph.

Street Photographs Captured with a Pinhole Camera Strapped to the Face

Some street photographers like to operate stealthily, while others are bold and confrontational. Very few will look as strange as Nicholas Williams to the people they photograph. The Ann Arbor, Michican-based artist visited New York City last year and shot a series of photos using a strange-looking pinhole camera that he strapped to his face with twine.

Media Publishes Wrong Facebook Photo in Wake of Tragic Shooting

Earlier today, unimaginable tragedy struck the town of Newtown, Connecticut as 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School were gunned down by a man we now know to be 20-year-old Adam Lanza.

As details poured in over the course of the day, Lanza -- who took his own life at the scene -- was mistakenly identified by police as Ryan, his older brother. Because of this mistake, news organizations nationwide began searching for pictures of a Ryan Lanza matching the description of the gunman, subsequently stumbling upon and disseminating the wrong picture for several hours.

Face/Off: A Demonstration of Futuristic Face Replacement in Video

If you have two similar photos of two different people, Photoshopping one face onto the other isn't very difficult. Change that to two video clips of two people talking, and you have a much more challenging task on your hands. That's the problem Harvard University computational photography graduate student Kevin Dale decided to tackle. His research project, titled "Video Face Replacement," introduces a way of doing this "digital face transplant" in a relatively automated way. The demonstration video above shows how effective his technique is at doing the 'shop seamlessly.

How to Retouch Portraits Without Losing Skin Texture with Frequency Separation

Here's a great introductory retouching tutorial by photographer Sara Kiesling, who writes,

Basic skin retouching using frequency separation and dodging & burning. I use this process on every photo that I do, and I usually spend about 4-5 minutes on headshots like this (and less time on full body shots when there is obviously less detail in the face). This is not intended to be a high-end retouching tutorial, but techniques that can help people who want to do natural-looking retouching while maintaining most of the natural skin texture!

Frequency separation is a technique that allows you to give skin a smooth-yet-sharp look.

A Jaw-Dropping Demonstration of Beauty Retouching Done on 4K Video

Beauty retouching on still photographs of faces is both ubiquitous and controversial in some industries. You've likely seen your fair share of tutorials and demonstrations that show amazing feats of Photoshop, but did you know that the same 'shops can be done on video? And not just any video, mind you: 4K video.

Bizarre Portraits of People With the Back of Their Heads as Beards

Upside Down (Faces) is a bizarre portrait project by Milano, Italy-based photographer Davide Tremolada. The photos show the front and back sides of individuals digitally blended into a single head, with the backside of the head serving as a giant beard. The resulting look is quite surreal, especially if the subject already had a beard to begin with.

Using a Face Detector to Generate Creepy Mugs from Random Polygons

The man in the moon and the face on mars. These are both the result of a psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia, which involves the brain trying to perceive random signals as significant. It's one of the brain's face detection mechanisms, and causes us to see faces where they don't actually exist -- the Virgin Mary's face on toast, for example.

Programmer Phil McCarthy decided to play around with the idea of paredoila in artificial intelligence, and created a program called pareidoloop. It uses face detection algorithms to "see" human faces in randomly generated polygons.

YouTube Offers Face Blurring Technology

YouTube just announced a useful new feature: an easy face blur option. The announcement says the feature is aimed for news and human rights agencies to protect privacy and identities especially if posting images of activists who may need to remain anonymous or if minors are present in the videos and privacy is a concern.

Models’ Faces Split and Mirrored Down the Middle

Photographer Wendelin Spiess created this series of images for the latest edition of USED magazine. Spiess took photographs of models, split the faces down the middle, and mirrored them. They say human beauty has a lot to do with facial symmetry -- perhaps models' faces are more symmetrical than your average mug?

Photograph the Left Side of People’s Faces to Capture More Emotion

Everybody has had pictures taken that they can hardly stand to look at. Even professional portraits that eliminate blemishes and show you in attractive poses sometimes look strained, or emotionless. Well, a recent study published in Experimental Brain Research seems to say that the remedy could be as easy as turning the other cheek.

Facial Recognition Software Guesses Age Based on a Photo

Facial recognition service Face.com has announced a new feature in its API: age detection. After analyzing a photograph of a person's face, the software returns three values: minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age, along with the confidence level of the guesses. Applications for the new technology include enhanced parental controls and targeted advertising.

Basketball Fan’s Secret Weapon is a Giant Photo of His Own Face

An Alabama basketball fan named Jack Blankenship has been attracting quite a bit of media attention for his creative method of distracting opposing players when they shoot free throws: Blankenship printed out a giant photograph of himself making a strange face and waves it around while making the same face. His antics quickly caught the attention of sports writers, television cameras, and the Internet -- one screen grab from a recent game has been viewed over half a million times already online.

Abstract Photos of Faces That Resemble Exploding Fireworks

Photographer and makeup artist Nadia Wicker has a beautiful series of abstract photographs titled Ursides in which she captures self-portraits in which her face looks like exploding fireworks. While her method is secret, Wicker says that she uses her experience with makeup -- rather than Photoshop -- to create the photos.