About a year ago, my 14-year-old started this new and often annoying habit.
He held his phone up to my forehead or chin while I was otherwise engaged, including driving, and snapped a picture. The resulting image gave him great joy as he giggled and shared it with a text group of his close friends.
He wisely concealed these images from me for some time. I really didn’t think anything about it. He did it to himself all the time, so I just laughed and played along. I didn’t realize he was taking these photos on .5 zoom, distorting my features into a caricature.
I suspected Carlton was up to something when I saw his profile picture show up on our family’s “Life 360” account. It was cartoonish and hilarious. I asked him how he got such a picture of himself. That’s when he explained the trend he had been indulging in for months. I asked to see his collection of my photos. They were many, and they were weird.
Here’s a selection of what he had readily available on his phone:
Hardly flattering, these photos accentuate my most prominent facial features: my glasses, my nose, and my forehead. I don’t understand why everything gets more bulbous at the .5 setting, but the effect is undeniable. If you can’t laugh at yourself, you need to take a .5 selfie. It’s humbling and a good reminder not to take yourself so seriously.
After the big reveal, I insisted on seeing each one after he took it from that point forward to join in the fun. It’s now something we can share in together, and when you have a teenager, you appreciate those moments no matter what prompts them.
Curiosity sent me down an internet rabbit hole recently, and sure enough, I learned that taking .5 selfies was a trend. It was even covered in The New York Times. Most of the examples I saw weren’t as extreme as Carlton’s er… artwork… but the effects were similar.
I’ve learned to appreciate this new quirk of Carlton’s photography. His passion for .5 photos has cooled a bit, but it was inevitable, given the relatively short life of all fads and of teenage attention spans.
If this is the first you’re hearing about this, and you have a young person in your life, I encourage you to ask them about it. They probably have taken such photos of you already. And if you don’t have any teens around, just take a .5 selfie. No one says you have to be 14 to be up on the latest internet trend.
I think these photos are the perfect antidote to self doubt and insecurity. Rather than fighting your impulse to somehow minimize or change what you don’t like about yourself, the .5 selfie calls attention to it in a laughter-invoking way. Plus, when you share it with your friends and make them laugh, and they in turn, share their .5 selfies or photos of their parents, it becomes a real bonding moment.
I like to think a .5 photo is how we look to babies. That would at least explain why they always seem to laugh when they look at me.
New South Essays 