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It's the camera. A wider lens will help immensely, but you'll need a dedicated camera for it. I never use my cellular camera for selfies.
The lens doesn’t matter.
To help stem the downvotes from people who don't understand, if you take a picture of a vase with various mm lenses from the same distance and then crop to the size of the vase, every picture will be the same. It's only distance that matters. Taking 20 pictures in a grid really close to your face with a telephoto lens and stitching them together into a single picture will result in a wide angle shot.
True but the point of using a different lens is that you move closer / father away from the objective. You get the best head shots from a distance with a telephoto lens. Not really practical for selfies of course.
You get the same shot from that distance with a wide angle lens. All a telephoto lens does is optically crop the picture.
Okay, that's simply untrue. Look into dolly zoom to see the difference in action
It's actually true though. Only difference is you need to crop the image on a wider lens, making the quality lower.
Yes, I realized they are right but their original statement that the lens doesn't matter is still wrong. I can't crop without losing quality and uncropping only works in shitty movies
A dolly zoom moves the camera, that’s the entire point of a dolly zoom. The zoom while moving the camera is only there to keep the framing the same, the actual visual change is caused by the movement of the camera, not by the changing of the focal length. You’d get the exact same effect if you used a fixed-focus lens and just cropped the resulting video to keep the framing constant.
Okay, now I get what you're saying and you're absolutely correct. But from the perspective of the photographer, it doesn't really matter. The motif you're aiming for is fixed. What you then influence is distance and lens and lens I can directly read from my camera. If I shoot with a wide angle, I have to get closer to get the motif that I want, if I zoom in, I need to step back. So, yes, technically distance is what matters but the distance correlates with the lens I'm using. That's why tips like "shoot portraits with 85 mm to get the most natural look" still make sense although you're right
If I shoot with a wide angle, I have to get closer to get the motif that I want
You can also just crop the picture instead of getting closer. Especially with modern cameras with a zillion megapixels this is a viable option.