These pictures of my raw SPFX were taken with a Canon Rebel. A fun thing to do is save these and put them in a folder by themselves and keep clicking forward while looking at them with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. The difference is substantial.

First is the picture with a focal length of 31mm (standing close, zoomed out).


Next is the picture at a focal length of 149mm (zoomed in).


The angles aren't exact, but pretty close.

Yes. The actual photographic term for that is perspective distortion.

I would recommend that anyone taking photos of their helmets to try to standardize on standing 5-8 feet away from the helmet, then zooming in. This will greatly reduce perspective distortion.

Wow the face looks shrunken? Is that really how small the face is?

Technically, neither is really an accurate representation. Same mask, different focal lengths.

Whoa!!!

Yeah, gives you an idea of how much stock to put in pictures.

Different setting, different angle, obviously. This is actually the SPFX I have as finished by Phil, but the cast is exactly the same as the other.

There is still plenty of distortion here, but it gives a somewhat better representation of the proportions. Still, it is a far, far from perfect photo. (Yes, I am replacing that oversized armour soon.)



Apologies if these pics are super massive, I'm on a pretty good sized lcd now. I've kind of lost perspective.

Additional proof of Perspective Distortion

Rubie's facemask, slightly modified, photographed 2 feet away:



Same, four feet away



Same, eight feet away

Would you believe these are actually the SAME helmet?



Again, these are photographed at two different distances.

Yeah, cameras do lie!

Great demonstration photo's.

Here are my demo photos with my new rubies supreme:

8 ft:



4 ft:



2 ft:



It is amazing how different distance can make the same helmet photograph look completely changed. This was a pretty cool little experiment.

Excellent illustration of the issue. Looking at the movie we have no idea what kind of distance/apature/focal length they used for each scene. Add to that a 35mm-70mm anamorphic lens - which is probably doing a whole lot of other things too.

It just goes to show that theres a very good reason why people cant make their helmet look like that famous close up of Vaders face on the Tantive IV!

Cheers

Jez

Bingo,

In movies, they typically stay a certain distance away. If they have to, they zoom in tight.

Let me ping one of my roommates, who is a pro photographer and who has worked on various Hollywood sets.

A while ago, I took a kinda crappy pic I had (hard to believe all these pics are the same helmet) and used my NON-EXISTANT Photoshop skills to warp the hell out of it. I also badly added shadows over the eyebrows. It's all stretched and squished, yet looks a little like the Tantive IV close-up. To me anyway.




Another thing this helps me understand is why the VM1 is such a hard helmet to take pics of. One of my favorite helmets, and of all the pics I've seen there's only a few that give a good representation of how it actually looks. One of them is the VM1 with the armor on your site Jez, the other is a pic my gf took while I was wearing mine.