What Is “selfie 0.5”?
The humiliating thing about working on the Internet is to think that you are up to date with all the latest trends. I spend my professional and personal life on the Internet, so I have to be trendy, right? Wrong, of course. Case in point: selfie 0.5 (pronounced point five or sometimes zero point five). You’ve heard about it? Me too. But this is nothing new , so let’s catch up.
I was with friends and family over the weekend and captured the moment with a few selfies, just like you. But after I took enough photos, one of us – the buzzer – took out her phone and said: “And one selfie 0.5”. The rest of us (millennials) had no idea what a 0.5 selfie was. (Don’t get too complacent, Generation Z. Someday soon you, too, will lose touch with what ‘s cool to kill.)
Anyway, she flipped her phone over, took a photo and showed us: We all looked small and the space around us was compressed. Perhaps most notably, her arm looked much longer than it really was. It worked: a 0.5 selfie is, of course, a selfie taken with your phone’s 0.5x ultra-wide-angle camera. Whoever named this thing knew what he was doing.
A bit of background on ultra wide-angle cameras
Ultra wide angle cameras produce an image very different from your standard or zoom lenses. They are designed with a large field of view to capture more of your surroundings. For example, the iPhone’s ultra-wide camera has a 120ยบ field of view . Some manufacturers call this “0.5x zoom” because the lens captures more of the scene than your 1x zoom camera (even though those cameras don’t actually zoom in the usual sense of the word ).
These lenses have not always been part of the iPhone or smartphones in general. The LG G5 started the ultra-wide screen craze back in 2016 , and smartphone makers have been adding them ever since. In the US, the iPhone is king, so it makes sense that the technology exploded as soon as Apple offered it with the iPhone 11 . Since then, if you bought an iPhone, or any other Android phone on the market, you had access to the ultra-wide-angle camera and thus the ability to take 0.5 selfies.
0.5 selfies should look weird
In practice, the most beautiful ultra-wide shots are landscapes: you can fit a lot more scene into your photo without noticeable distortion. However, due to the way these lenses work, the closer you are to the subject, the more distortion there is, almost creating a fisheye effect. Everything close to the lens is stretched and deformed, so if you’re trying to take a traditionally eye-catching shot, you’re not using 0.5x magnification on subjects or even your average image. This is more typical for stylized shots. It so happened that this style captured generation Z.
The beauty of the 0.5 selfie lies in the distortion. Sure, it’s nice that the ultra-wide-angle camera can capture everything (and everyone) in the frame, but the same can be said for regular selfies. The 0.5x zoom camera makes the hand of the photographer taking a selfie look crazy. This makes anyone whose face is close to the lens look funny. It makes selfies a little more interesting, and it’s much more fun to view those shots in your camera roll or on Instagram.
How to take a selfie 0.5
The 0.5 selfie is easy enough to take: you open the camera app, then switch to the 0.5 wide-angle camera. Now flip your phone so that you are facing the rear cameras, lift your phone and take a selfie with the volume button. (If it’s a little tricky, use the camera app’s timer.) Of course, you won’t be able to see what you’re shooting, but that’s part of the fun: your exaggerated shots will come back a little silly (and your hand will look like a human selfie stick).
0.5 selfies are not new
Now I thought I stumbled upon a new trend, and maybe you, reading this, think you have learned something new too. Alas, it is not. A quick Google search for “0.5 selfie” reveals that this type of photography was already part of the online discussions a year ago . It makes me think that it used to be cool. So be gentle: don’t tell the zoomers in your life about this “funny new selfie.” You will laugh out of the room. But at least you won’t be surprised if someone asks you to take a “0.5 selfie” at your next family gathering. Damn, surprise everyone by offering to take one for yourself.