One. Two. Three. Smile. With the rise of extravagant techy gadgets and an increasing influence of social media websites, most people put priorities on taking outstanding and worthy-posting photos. If avid picture takers have rules to follow, Science takes over with its findings on how to take a great selfie.
A computer science graduate student at Stanford University, Andrej Karpathy conducted a study by assigning an image-recognizing deep neural network to come out with a rule to follow on getting professional and stellar selfie pictures. Karpathy's study led him to one recommendation, "Follow the rule of thirds."
According to learnprophotography.com, the rule of thirds is one of the basic rules in art and photographic composition and originated from a hypothesis that human eyes tend to focus on the intersection points that appear when a picture is cut into thirds. It is a method created to aid artists and photographers producing drama and appeal in their master piece. The rule states that a piece should be split into nine sections. Then two imaginary horizontal lines are crossing two vertical lines. The most vital elements rested on or close to the imaginary lines and where the lines cross.
The result of the study reveals that women who follow the rule of thirds and let go of their long hair on their shoulders, more likely take exceptional selfie pictures. The results were taken through a Convolutional Neural Network, a data mining network that can tell if a selfie photo was effective or not.. The experiment was done through managing a script with the help of ConvNet in gathering pictures tagged with #selfie. The collected photos were trimmed down from more than 5 million to 2 million single photos.
Karpathy examined the number of likes per followers. Describing the process he said, "I took all the users and sorted them by their number of followers. I gave a small bonus for each additional tag on the image, assuming that extra tags bring more eyes. Then I marched down this sorted list in groups of 100, and sorted those 100 selfies based on their number of likes. I only used selfies that were online for more than a month to ensure a near-stable like count."
Karpathy arrived on these conclusions after getting the 100 highest ranked photos.
Women makes better selfies. "There is not a single guy in the top 100," Karpathy said. He also noticed that women with long hair create better selfies especially if their hair run down on their shoulders. Karpathy also suggested two additional tips, "1.) Filters work. Whether black and white or a color scheme that provides contrast, don't leave your selfie with some kind of filter; 2.) Add a border to the selfie. Borders earn "double taps."
