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Comment by starkfist | Hacker News Reader

A 20mm lens is not an excellent portrait lens. It will make your face look fatter.

> A 20mm lens is not an excellent portrait lens. It will make your face look fatter.

It depends on the sensor size. A 20mm lens in (35mm) full-frame is a very wide lens. A 20mm lens on a Canon/Nikon DSLR is the same as a 35mm lens on a (35mm) full-frame. A 20mm lens on a point-and-shoot is even "longer".

In a (micro)4/3ds camera, 20mm is equivalent to 40mm in 35mm, which is close to a normal lens. It's on the short end for portraiture, but you can get nice results if the lens is fast enough.

Going by the analysis in the post, and in the parent comment, the 20mm would probably be positively correlated with attractiveness because it's easier to get a shallower depth of field with it.

However, you're certainly correct that conventional photographic wisdom is that people look better on longer lenses, for just the reason you cite -- wider angles can distort faces unpleasantly. It would have been interesting to see an analysis of lens length & perceived attractiveness from this dataset.

You have to be too close to the face in order to throw out the background with a 20mm 1.9. It's going to make the nose look weird and accentuate a double chin, if you have one. (I have the same camera and lens)

I get great results from using that lens for portraits. The 20mm lens is really a 40mm due to the x2 cropped sensor in m4/3 cameras.

40mm equiv. is too wide for portraiture. typically you use around an 85mm lens. this would work out to 40-50mm in micro four thirds.

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