I solved a personal mystery this morning, and thought I would share. For months I’ve seen posts on blogs with this bizarre look, the ratios seem off, as though the photos were being shot with some weird distance set to make the avatar look enlongated. Some of you guys look like you have these weird skinny heads with long thin bodies.

I love you, but you do.

I haven’t been able to figure out why you’d choose that – as it’s not being used in an artsy setting, and it’s a bit hard on the eyes – it looks OFF is my first thought.

I shoot at 3999 X whatever it is that constrains proportions to make sure that the images I’m sharing aren’t distorted.  My machine doesn’t handle shooting over 3999 very well, and because of the old black line bug I got in the habit of stopping there. It works ok for me.

Over the weekend, I was in a hurry and snapped pics at the home tour, and realized for expediency, I could just upload them to Flickr directly. Looking back at those photos, I felt like something was off but couldn’t put my finger on it.

This morning, I decided to shoot some Gidge shots to go with it, and was super pressed for time – so I shot directly to Flickr. It does constrain the image to a smaller resolution than I like but I didn’t consider this a deal breaker. I used to nearly EXCLUSIVELY use this feature a couple of years ago, because I am a lazy blogger.  It made my life SO easy.

I toggled over to verify my shot – and my first thought was – WHAT THE HELL.

I toggled back – and without moving my camera at all – took another snap and sent it to my hard drive at my normal size. The difference in the look I got was staggering to me.

There has been no edit to these pictures at all, I dropped the URLS into Big Huge Labs for a clean mosaic that would preserve the resolution of each image and the distortion.

Great photographers like Cajsa or Strawberry Singh could probably tell you how to use the direct from Firestorm upload and NOT distort your AV – but it seems to me that the loss of resolution size that is automatic makes it not worth it, at least not for good quality pictures.

As for me, no more direct from Firestorm to Flickr. Mystery solved.