Why is it SO hard to take pictures of BIG hair?!

[CurlyCap]

The humidity is doing some incredibly hilarious things to my hair and I keep trying to take pictures to send to my friends. Thing is, no picture (self-portrait with a good camera-phone) can quite capture how absolutely ginormous my hair is right now. I look very sane in pictures while at work my friends are laughing their butts off at the limits of volume my hair is reaching.

Has anyone else with big/curly hair experienced this? And while I know it's the opposite of what people normally ask, any tips on capturing giant hair in it's natural state?

[katsrevenge]

Lower angles maybe? Have a buddy take a lower angled rear shot.... those always made my hair very badly big looking.

[HintOfMint]

How strange, the camera usually adds ten pounds to me! :p

[sycamoreboutiqu]

Yes, I know what you mean. Just yesterday I tried to take a mirror photo in a different room than usual and realized even though I was already about 4 feet away I still wasn't far enough away from the mirror to fit all the hair in the frame.

[Suze2012]

Good to see someone just having a giggle with the frizz! lol!

Maybe you should get someone to do three shots and then you can crop them into a panoramic view? :)

[XcaliburGirl]

I think it must be that you need the full 3-Dimensional effect.

When I was going through the worst awkward stage of growing out my pixie cut, I kept trying to take a picture of the back flipping up ridiculously. However, the pictures never really did it justice, so I never bothered posting them.

[auburntressed]

Maybe you could get someone to take a photo for you, and you hold something in the picture to illustrate scale? Like a beach ball?

So like... hold the beach ball directly above your head (if you can). If not... hold it like in front of you just below your neck.

[torrilin]

A lot of times, people take portraits from fairly far away.

If you use a camera with a lens that has a wider angle of view than you'd normally use, the photographer has to get closer, and that can make a prominent feature appear more prominent. You can probably find out what kind of lens your camera-phone has, so you'd know if a friend with a regular camera can take a wider angle shot.

Another thing that helps is detail. If your hair is a uniform sort of color, it would probably help if you can get lighting so it looks to have more variation than it really does. Think about how luxepiggy tends to look in her pictures, or how some of Madora's pictures have *lots* of flash reflections.

Stuff that fills the picture's frame, or even extends a bit out tends to look bigger too. So a portrait where we see mostly your hair filling the frame and maybe a smidge of your face might look like you have bigger hair than a more normal face front portrait. Looking way up at someone or way down on them tends to change how they look too... A lot of the time when gossip magazines are trying to claim that an actress is "fat", they make sure to use a lot of pictures where the photographer is looking down her cleavage so her proportions look weird and fatter. And when an actress has "slimmed down" they print pictures taken near her feet, so her legs look longer and thinner, and so does the rest of her.

We tend to strip stuff down in our heads to a kind of caricature, so things that strike us appear larger than life or enhanced in some way. Photographs don't do that... so we have to learn to imitate the editing our brains do.