How to conceal your belly
The camera adds 10 pounds, they say
Hey, I’m Bonnie and welcome to my Friday newsletter. Each week I share insight into the art of being photogenic, Including how to pose, what to wear—fashionable style, makeup—and a lot of whatnot that may benefit your photo. Why, because you can do all that with a phone camera.
If you’re not a subscriber, here’s what you missed this month:
1.Stop ruining your birthday with crude methods regarded as old hat.
2.How to Master the Baddie Look in Your Photos
3.Millennials vs. Gen Z Selfies
Subscribe to get access to these posts, and every post.
After the groundhog promised an early spring by which he meant dress warmly and cumbrously all winterlong bundled up in a heavy coat and sweater, spring has finally sprung. The springtime is high time for us to stow our woolen outerwear and thermal underwear in favor of lighter wear. Let us leave our close rooms to get better air in our lungs. Or, better, the possibility for change was in the air when all of a sudden the hard facts of winter took the spring out of my step.
Those failed new-year resolutions to mend my ways through diet and exercise risk exposure to social media so long as I'm not protected by some substantial coverage (such as a coat or jacket and sweater) against flank attacks or turning movements in front of the camera. I may not look it, but I feel deflated. Luckily, I know something about how to deal with lousy exposure.
Look at these side-by-side pics of me taken the selfsame day:
Be careful there as you sidestep a spare tire in the dumpster fire of a pic on the left.
Spoiler alert, most visitors omit to walk round the walls, do a one-eighty, and crash. This monograph has little to reward the tough-minded reader, in the habit of searching for brass tacks.
Read on a bit further to stay ahead of the curve in snapping rich, bougie brass photographs.
When you get right down to it, this issue is one with wide-ranging interests, but the facts are straightforward. You’re not going to face away from the camera to take a picture of the back of your head, so that leaves you with three possibilities: face front, diagonal, or with one side to the camera.
Even a pregnant woman can hide her baby bump faced forward. On the contrary, I would have a pregnant woman turn sideways to show her belly. What does that tell you? And whyever would you face with one side to the camera if you were not pregnant and did not want to profile a midriff bulge?
It tells you facing forward is a haven.
Maybe safety isn’t sexy. Then again, risqué isn’t always risky. This is where the twist comes in.
Think about the queen of hearts on a playing card. Turn the card slightly on edge and the queen appears thinner than she did face up. But the queen is flat. And while your photo is, you’re not. This parlor trick of a diagonally thinned torso may impart a negative pregnant in the showing of a protuberance. This includes not only beer bellies and double chins but also weak jaws and ovoid chins turned turtle in effect receding from overbites, and any other unideal side to showcase. In these cases, follow your nose, says Toucan Sam. I think he’s got them exactly right. Better to face that beak anterior and have other parts follow suit in the eye of the camera than to give feature sidelights on an aquiline profile. Same goes for those without a nose to speak of, namely Voldemort.
So here’s the paradox: if I face forward, I won’t show any protuberance, but I will look wider than I would elsewise. If I turn myself diagonally, I’ll look thinner but any protuberance will show, if only slightly or rather dramatically, depending on how much of an slant I take toward going all in profile, where I’ll maximize any protuberance but absent that will look thinner. Because even in a black-and-white checkered cotton with a button-on collar, designed to take the focus of attention off the waistline, the long, graceful torso has a wider measure across the front than along either side of the waist. It just is mathematically so.
So what do you do? Well, if your biggest concern is hiding a belly, your best bet is to face the camera. If this is no concern of yours, consider something else. Suppose you were that string bean of a kid glowing up or else you just have a jacked body, so you wouldn’t want a turnabout in profile leaving your head and body and feet pointing whichway. That’ll make you look ultrathin and cancel out the gains you made at the gym. Your happy medium is to face diagonal, halfway through a perpendicular, standing at 45-degree angles to the sight line of the camera, pointing your body a little bit off-center. This will add curvature to slender builds without making wide bodies look oversize.
And if you are neither skinny nor husky and not concerned with concealing a protuberance, then standing in profile is fine and dandy with me. There’s no inherent reason for thinking the right angle has the wrong conviction, you just have a different slant on the problem not designed to give the illusion of curves. Or perhaps you want to look toward the horizon. We all know millennials love a good side hustle—to fuel both their passions and their wallets—as in a print of Frank Sinatra’s mugshot. The record “playing with the queen of hearts” … nope—play “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”
Now that you know how to face the camera, don’t just stand there. Stand up straight. You don’t need to suck in your stomach and hold your breath. You want to look natural. Nothing looks more unnatural than not breathing.
You also want to look confident, not demure. Roll your shoulders back, give your neck a little stretch. And above all else, remember to breathe. These simple adjustments not only correct your posture but also relax you. This way, you appear confident, not tense or withdrawn. And you have good reason, too, seeing as how your belly has flattened out—opposed to how paunchy it looked beforehand slumped over in a slouch. And if you’re busty, these uplifting tweaks are doubly so.
How’s about lighting? Eliminate light coming from underneath your face in a way that you hold a flashlight to tell a ghost story, which is unnatural, supernatural even, like the presage of a corpse candle in the churchyard. So that leaves you, once again, with three possibilities: frontlighting, sidelight, and overhead lighting.
Frontlighting, coming in a window or from a source set up above the camera at a 45-degree angle, will leave cast shadow out of the picture, so you can put that dark concern behind you. The light will fill in every crack and crevice like putty, which is good to flatten out a pot belly but not so good to spotlight six-pack abs, or define any other feature. In contrast, your cast shadow is part and parcel of sidelight and overhead light. That is, illumination coming in a windowlight or from a lamp alongside you; also: overtopping you: as produced by a ceiling light or a ray of sunlight falling in the midday.
The direction of light will throw off shadow on the side of you opposite the light source; ergo, the cast shadow from overhead lighting will fall below your abs, under your eyes, and your nose, among other parts. You can show off your bod without application of dark under-the-eye shadow or looking down your nose at people with all the visceral compulsion of Pinocchio lying and generally looking shady AF. Spotlight your deific chisel on top of overcoming this fear of the dark you cast aside in virtue of sidelight.
OK. I presume you are not doing a tasteful nude afterward. Before you start dressing, however, let me add a life update on spring fashion. Something of a trend I noticed recently in the newest line.
You may have seen the above photo. It has been making the rounds on TikTok, dubbed the ultimate it-girl outfit for spring/summer. When it comes to social media clinging, with a true instinct for style, to what is terse and elliptic, women everywhere are holding their own with devastating consequences of a belly flop on the platform.
Trust me, as a fashion photog, I’ve seen it. The runway model who spun onto the catwalk at once, in a clothing style, is little more than an animated fashion plate. The same women’s wear made me look like a fashion victim.
The dressing room is a great gut check, especially with bellies in mind. It forces us to see the little white dress for what it is: not the little black dress with a slimming hipline. Now, here’s my virtual reality check. The little white dress, lending zero definition on the hipline through the waist up to the bustline of the model in the photo, just is not going to look the same pictured on me. In fact, such cuts or styles loom large and make me look wider than I actually am.
Knowing some fashion designer made you look bad in front of the camera is not a way that you want to start off a photo session. Even fashion models sometimes struggle to pull off this silhouette. There is a picture of a model holding what might be the same dress cinched up in dramatic fashion to give her figure some semblance of shape.
The bottom line is her blouse bellied out round her. Opt for a cut or style of garment with a tapering hipline, especially pieces that highlight this transition through the waist up to the bustline. Such a streamlined torso will make you not only look good but also feel good, exuding that air of confidence the cameras love.
This all is so in the silhouettes of A line and wrap dresses. Each of these cuts or styles flatter and flatten with a blend of elegance and comfort (in cotton jersey no less). A little white dress linking the A-line with all the wrap components in place, would fill the bill just as easily and more plausibly. Check out several on trend I’m eyeing HERE, HERE, and HERE. And for damage control with a body shapers, click HERE or HERE.
If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. There are group discounts, gift options, and referral bonuses available.
I leave you with some parting wisdom from Coca Chanel: “Fashion changes, style remains.” Thank you-all who came this far in supporting my work. Stay Photogenic.
Warm regards,
Bonnie