Sometimes I feel like Britney Spears in her song “You want a piece of me”. Look at the comments in any of my videos and you will see a wide array of criticisms of my physique all in the very same video:
- some will say I’m too fat
- some will say I’m too thin
- some will say my chest is too big
- some will say my chest is too small
- some will say my legs are too big
- some will say my legs are too small
- many say I’m ugly
Good thing the only person I need to please is myself, I would go crazy trying to please everyone :)
The point of this post is about camera angles. In person, nobody ever tells me I need to work on my legs and I dont think its because I’m intimidating. I am 240lbs of muscle but nobody is threatened by me when they meet me, I smile and laugh too much to be intimidating. What I realized is that the way I film most of my videos, the camera angle is such that my chest is closer to the camera than my legs thus my chest appears larger than it is in proportion to the rest of my body. Just to reverse things, I took the above shot to show how much camera angles affect perception. If I shot all my videos from the above perspective, first, people would think I was weird. But secondly, they would all be telling me that I need to lay off the legs and concentrate more on upper body. Its all camera angles. I have been working hard on my legs over the last 3 months when my shoulder has been out of commission but I’m sure there has been no noticeable increase in thigh measurements, muscle gain is much slower than that in 50 year olds :)
On the subject of proportions. Many comments on my videos are of the “your head is too small – hee, hee, hee” variety. One interesting thing, all humans regardless of size have almost exactly the same size head. Why? Because a brain is a brain and it doesnt vary in size according to the size of the torso. A 4′ midget has the same size head as Andre the Giant. What this means is that you can get a good idea how tall someone is even if you just see a photo of them from the shoulders up. If their head looks like a teacup on broad shoulders then they are very tall – this is the case with me. If the head is nearly as wide as the shoulders then they are very, very short. This can come in very handy when look at photos of pro bodybuilders because often there is no background to give you a context of their height. Many people are surprised when they meet a pro bodybuilder in person how short they are because the photos dont give a reference unless you know what to look for.
This photo was taken on Halloween day. No, this wasnt my Halloween costume :) As you would expect though, my halloween costume never includes a shirt :)