I like OkTrends because they use heaps of data to arrive at interesting conclusions. But they often arrive at wrong (or at least incomplete) conclusions.
For instance, this bit: "the general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures". That's certainly true. Think about the person behind the camera, though. If they own a dSLR, they're more likely to be good at composing photographs.
This, too: "a 28 year-old who used a flash is as attractive as a 35 year-old who didn't". Most people don't know how, or even when, to use a flash. Using a flash properly can and does lead to a better photograph, but it takes a lot of practice.
Therefore, if you want to have an attractive picture, have somebody that's good at taking pictures take it.
It's true. Every time I read one of these OK Cupid analyses, I hear alarm after alarm in my head about bad statistics analysis. But I always read them anyway, because as long as you step back and think about it carefully, the data really is interesting.
An example of another minor quabble, iPhones are expensive. I would expect that owning one correlates with nicer clothes, makeup, and just more/better status symbols in general. It's no news that money is attractive.
You'd be surprised at how many people who own iphones own one outside of their means. There are tons of people working two jobs or never eating out just to pay their cell phone bill.
I wouldn't be too surprised. I spent one summer working in a warehouse. Suffice to say the cars (and their respective rims, sound systems, etc) were not within reasonable spending habits for my fellow $8/hr workers. And their families :(
But the point stands: signaling wealth is what counts.
Of course, there are. The question though is whether there is enough of a correlation with third variables to lead one to believe 'possessing iphone' = 'possessing more sex partners' is likely not causal? As GP and other commenters point out, there are enough.
If you're working on minimum wage...yes. That is a fairly significant proportion of their income. 40 x 7.75=$310 (before taxes)=$1240...so $50 is about 4% of their total monthly income, not a small amount to squander.
>If they own a dSLR, they're more likely to be good at composing photographs.
That's a very valid point, selection bias is the most-missed bias in studies of every stripe. But they're not beginners:
>And we also found similar numbers looking only at people who uploaded all three types of photos.
They didn't show a graph of that data, because this is an article rather than a formal study. Getting similar results in an intersection study is an excellent way to show that selection bias was at least not overwhelming - depending on the sample size, it might not even be significant.
The conclusion they made was pretty well supported, and seems like something you would agree with - the details they give are quick guidelines, but it boils down to "photographic skill matters".
They're not correlating the use of a flash with photographs being "better" in some general way; they're correlating the use of a flash with specific ratings of the attractiveness of the people in the resulting photos.
If the data is accurate, then the correlation is real. It might be that most people don't know how to use a flash; it might also be that natural light makes people appear more attractive, or that the position of the light source (i.e. not in the same place as the camera) does the same.
Building a reliable causality model out of correlations can be extremely difficult, but that doesn't mean that anything short of a complete causality model is worthless. In this example, dispensing with the flash would still likely improve the ratings of most users' photos (other things equal, of course), even if they might squeeze a bit more out of the result by mastering the nuances of flash photography.
> Using a flash properly can and does lead to a better photograph, but it takes a lot of practice.
I recognize that my P&S camera isn't fast enough to take pictures in low light without the flash, but are there other situations where I should be using a flash?
Generally, using a flash makes my pictures look "cheap" (better than blurry, I suppose). Even when there is strong backlighting and I need to use the flash to balance it out, it still looks wrong.
Much to my wife's consternation, I usually tend to push the no-flash as much as possible (I've missed quick-moving children and other shots because of this). I suppose if I used the flash I would have actually captured the moment, but I don't think I've really seen a picture I've taken with the flash that I've found to be remarkable looking.
One quick tip if you're using the flash on a P&S is to use something to diffuse the flash. Simply hold a piece of white paper or thin plastic or something similar in front of the flash and you'll almost always get better results.
In a "normal" room (i.e., a room of normal ceiling height), using the ceiling is a solid bet. If your camera has TTL flash metering (and which self-respecting DSLR doesn't?) that'll help you take "perfect" pictures, every time.
(Note: "perfect" means people will ask you how you did it, and be suitably impressed at your photography skizzles)
Firing flash along the axis of the lens is a poor idea almost always. Also, your pop-up flash has an effective range of ~10 feet (depending on camera), so popping it beyond that range (which I see many people do) is basically pointless. In fact, if there are objects near, what the camera will do is expose for those objects, leaving your main subjects, who are too far away, in shadow.
This is why you'll see those crazy pictures where everyone is real dark and has glowing eyes.
But all in all, the solution is to get a faster lens - there are many point and shoots that have premium, fast lenses. Going for those will allow you to skip the flash for a lot more occasions, making better pictures overall.
As you can see, the general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures.
Argh, no! That is correlation. More complex cameras are probably used by more experienced photographers. I would bet a high percentage of those are made by professionals.
The following sentence, "Interchangable lens cameras (like digital SLRs) make you look more attractive than your basic point and shoot cameras" implies causation.
More complex cameras have greater dynamic range, thus better capturing both shadow detail and not blowing out or washing out the highlights (lightest parts) of the image.
They also have better image sensors which means less degradation in low light situations, less graininess, and with better lenses, less distortion.
This is both true and irrelevant. It is completely possible to avoid blown highlights and noisy shadows with any point and shoot camera. At the size pictures are presented on dating sites, the optics and sensors of any point and shoot are also more than adequate.
More clearly: that the pictures taken with point-and-shoot cameras are crappy is not the fault of those cameras, and pictures taken at the same time by the same person with a different camera would likely also be crappy.
speaking as a crappy photographer, I disagree. A nice camera with a reasonable lens makes up for a lot of photographer incompetence. I mean, yeah, my photographs, in general, turn out much worse than photographs taken by a person who knows what they are doing. However, my photographs taken with cheap point and shoot cameras, well, you can't even tell what the subject is half the time. A good camera brings the picture quality up to "you can read the serial number off the equipment if you zoom in" - I mean, the composition isn't any good, and I've got flash glare, but it's a /huge/ difference.
and, considering that for most things I take photos for (usually something I'm selling) have a relatively low 'good enough' bar, a good camera is the cheapest way for me to get above that bar.
Actually for the same size lens, a larger aperture (lower f-stop number, e.g. f2.8 vs. f8) always results in less depth of field. More precision, better design and better optical quality glass all cost more.
Since more expensive optics usually tend to have a larger max aperture ...
I just got a Panasonic GF-1 this spring, and it has refreshed my passion for photography. I did a lot of research beforehand and I'm glad to see that OKCupid is confirming my choice. A fair bit of the credit has to go to the 20mm Pancake lens that Panasonic makes, it's one sweet piece of glass, and it lets you make excellent portraits, where the subject is in focus and the background is blurred. Like this photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/laprice/4757480230/in/set-72157...
> A 20mm lens is not an excellent portrait lens. It will make your face look fatter.
It depends on the sensor size. A 20mm lens in (35mm) full-frame is a very wide lens. A 20mm lens on a Canon/Nikon DSLR is the same as a 35mm lens on a (35mm) full-frame. A 20mm lens on a point-and-shoot is even "longer".
In a (micro)4/3ds camera, 20mm is equivalent to 40mm in 35mm, which is close to a normal lens. It's on the short end for portraiture, but you can get nice results if the lens is fast enough.
Going by the analysis in the post, and in the parent comment, the 20mm would probably be positively correlated with attractiveness because it's easier to get a shallower depth of field with it.
However, you're certainly correct that conventional photographic wisdom is that people look better on longer lenses, for just the reason you cite -- wider angles can distort faces unpleasantly. It would have been interesting to see an analysis of lens length & perceived attractiveness from this dataset.
You have to be too close to the face in order to throw out the background with a 20mm 1.9. It's going to make the nose look weird and accentuate a double chin, if you have one. (I have the same camera and lens)
It's a bit of both. The same reasonably-skilled photographer is going to take better photos with a SLR than with a camera phone. The better tool lets you use your better skills. (And even someone with no skills at all is going to get better results simply from the improved light-gathering and CCD quality.)
Shouldn't the conclusion here be "make friends with people that own Panasonic m4/3rds or nice dSLRs"? None of their example photos look like self portraits.
I just bought a remote for my camera precisely because my friends and I don't spend a lot of time taking pictures of each other. Sometime this week I'll spend the evening looking off camera like I'm having spontaneous fun with a bunch of people, when I'm actually alone, posing in my apartment, taking picture after picture trying to get my posture and facial expression just right.
Strangely enough, this strikes me as hilarious instead of depressing, and I'm actually looking forward to the challenge. I'm also looking forward to the laughter and teasing when I show off the results to my friends.
True, but you'd be surprised how many self-taken photos there are on OKC; either the notorious MySpace shot or the truly sad "self-portrait in bedroom full-length mirror".
Is the self portrait in a bedroom mirror really more sad than these photos that look like they were semi-professionally staged? In my experience with OKCupid "good" photos are often the least "accurate."
The self-portrait in mirror says to me: I have no friends who have ever taken a picture of me, and I'm so embarrassed about this online dating thing / have so little self-esteem that I can't ask someone to take a couple pictures of me, or even go outside and use the delay feature of my camera to get a decent self-portrait. Is that a somewhat harsh assessment? Yeah, probably, but it's the 0.5s reaction, which is, for-better-or-worse, how a lot of the decision is made.
And, yes, the semi-professional glamour shots can be an issue too, but in my experience they are much rarer. And at least in that case the person has enough self-esteem to try to look good.
I likely jumped to those conclusions long, long ago.
However, I do like OKC in that they take tons of data and make actual conclusions about it. Regardless of whether or not it's eventually proven wrong, or (as stated above) there are some obvious discrepancies not taken into consideration, it's still cool to see overall trends in human psychology based on something so simple as how a photograph was taken.
Woah woah woah. I'm sorry but best, more money correlating to more sex is baseless. I have a hunch that the statistics probably go in the exact opposite direction. Without taking into account birth control, it's well known that birth rates and number of children tend to be much higher for lower income people than higher.
Birth rates have been decoupled from sexual activity since the 1960s at the very least. And are completely irrelevant to that fraction of the sex-having populace that are homosexual.
There is some evidence that higher-status individuals of both genders have more sex; and money is a fairly strong proxy for status in our society.
The trouble is that "Android Phone" is not as meaningful a category as the article makes it out to be. Nor is "Motorola Phone."
Droid Eris is not a MotoDroid is not a N1 is not a Sidekick is not a HTC Evo ...
Really, there are certain Android and Motorola phones that could have very similar demographics to the Blackberry or iPhone. Furthermore, Comparing the cameras on the phones more recent than the MotoDroid to those that came before is night and day.
I've had the same kinds of thoughts about photos on real estate listings. So many pics look flat out terrible but could easily be fixed with as little as changing the white balance setting. Seeing some of the basic photographic mistakes in a business so dependent on photography is depressing.
Go to ebay and just watch how those items with a solid white background and at least somewhat professional photographed, as opposed to the crappy cell-phone shot pictures of items. Better picture=more money.
While I usually enjoy articles from okcupid, I found this one pretty disappointing, especially given I've seen good statistical analysis from them in the past.
This is just a series of classic correlation versus causation mistakes. Even beyond the purely statistical view of the issues here, it is clear to anyone with some basic knowledge of photography that most of their conclusions are flawed.
Hopefully they'll correct some of the wording to remove logical implication or just do a better job next time.
As a photographer you obviously know that better equipment takes better pictures, but without the data, assuming that better pictures result in more dates is a blind assumption. Just look at another of their posts which found that "myspace-style" self-shots worked better: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile...
Early-20's BlackBerry/Android owners fear not, statistically you will have more new partners in the next few years than iPhone owners. http://twitpic.com/2diasv
For instance, this bit: "the general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures". That's certainly true. Think about the person behind the camera, though. If they own a dSLR, they're more likely to be good at composing photographs.
This, too: "a 28 year-old who used a flash is as attractive as a 35 year-old who didn't". Most people don't know how, or even when, to use a flash. Using a flash properly can and does lead to a better photograph, but it takes a lot of practice.
Therefore, if you want to have an attractive picture, have somebody that's good at taking pictures take it.