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?
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Photographer Tadao Cern has an awesome project titled, ahem, Blow Job that consists of portraits of people having their faces blown by extremely strong blasts of air.
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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.
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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. If you want to test out the service yourself, you can play around with the API here (in the photo above, the correct age is ~47).
Face.com API Sandbox (via Face via Gizmodo via PopPhoto)
So I’ve been shooting some shows for some of the choral groups on campus at my school, and I’ve started to notice a trend: people make some stupid faces when they are singing. They can range from an approaching sneeze to a full-on O-face.
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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.
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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.
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Canon’s latest compact cameras at CES this year have some fancy new facial recognition features that assist in portrait shots. Up to 12 people can be stored in the camera. Simply snap a photo of your friends face, provide the friend’s name (and birthday if you wish), and the camera will recognize your friend from that point forward. In group shots, the camera will give your friends’ faces preferential treatment, making sure that they’re properly in focus and exposed.
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Here’s a quick and simple tip for better portraits by Reddit user rmx_:
Everyone has a lazy eye. By that, I mean one eye is always smaller and/or more closed than the other eye. In some people, it is very easy to spot; in others, nearly impossible. The “beautiful people” have more symmetrical faces, but still, one eye will open more than the other. (Denzel Washington has one of the most I have seen [...])
[...] here is the tip: get the smaller/lazier eye slightly closer to the camera. Oh, and don’t tell the person what you’re looking at their eyes for! You’ll make them self conscious. Simply ask them to look at your finger and move their head to follow it, and then guide them left or right as necessary. Chances are, the movement needed will not be so much that you have to adjust your lights.
You can read more about how facial symmetry relates to beauty in this Wikipedia article.
(via Reddit)
Image credit: Man portrait by Yuri Samoilov
It looks like Microsoft is finally putting its war chest and brilliant minds to good use: the company has released a new free app for Windows Phone users called Face Swap. The app uses face detection to let you quickly switch the faces of subjects in your photos. Simply shake the phone and faces will be swapped! The resulting face swap photos can be saved or shared on social networking websites. Hopefully they turn this into a web app soon.
