Jake Peterson
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Credit: Joel Cunningham
A humbling thing about working on the internet isthinking you are keeping up with all the latest trends. I spend my professional and personal life online, so I must be hip, right? Wrong, of course. Case in point: the 0.5 selfie (pronounced point five or sometimes zero point five). Have you heard of it? Neither had I. But it’s nothing new, so let’s catch up.
Over the weekend, I was out with friends and family and documenting the moment with some selfies, as you do. But after snapping what I thought to be enough photos, one of us—a zoomer—took out her phone, and said, “and one 0.5 selfie.” The rest of us (millennials) didn’t have a clue what a 0.5 selfie was. (Don’t feel too smug, Gen Z. Someday soon, you too will lose touch with what’s cool slay.)
Anyway, she flipped her phone around, took a photo, and showed us: We all looked small, while the space around us was compressed. Perhaps most notably, her arm looked way longer than it really was. It all clicked: a 0.5 selfie, of course, is a selfie taken with the 0.5x ultra-wide angle camera on your phone. Whoever named this thing knew what they were doing.
A little background on ultra-wide cameras
Ultra-wide angle cameras produce a much different image than your standard or zoom lenses. They’re designed with a large field of view, in order to take in more of your surroundings. The iPhone’s ultra-wide angle camera, for example, has an 120º field of view. Some manufacturers call this “0.5x zoom,” since the lens captures more of the scene than your 1x zoom camera (even though these cameras don’t actually zoom in the conventional sense of the term).
These lenses weren’t always a part of iPhones, or smartphones in general. The LG G5 kicked off the ultra-wide craze back in 2016, and smartphone manufacturers have been adding them ever since. In the U.S., the iPhone is king, so it makes sense the tech blew up once Apple offered it with the iPhone 11. Since then, if you bought an iPhone, or most any Android phone on the market, you’ve had access to an ultra-wide camera, and, thus, had the power to take a 0.5 selfie.
0.5 selfies are supposed to look weird
In practice, the best-looking ultra-wide shots are of landscapes: You can fit a lot more of the scene into your photo without much noticeable distortion. However, because of how these lenses work, the closer you are to a subject, the more distortion there is, almost creating a “fish eye” effect. Anything close to the lens gets stretched and warped, so if you’re trying to capture a traditionally appealing shot, you don’t use 0.5x for subjects, or even your average image out and about. It’s more common for stylized snapshots. That style has just so happened to grab ahold of Gen Z.
The appeal of the 0.5 selfie is the distortion. Sure, it’s nice the ultra-wide camera can get everything (and everyone) in the shot, but so can a normal selfie. The 0.5x camera makes it so the selfie-taker’s arm looks insane. It makes anyone whose face is close to the lens look funny. It makes selfies a bit more interesting, and it’s that much more fun to look back on these shots in your camera roll or your Instagram.
How to take a 0.5 selfie
The 0.5 selfie is easy enough to execute: You open your camera app, then switch to the 0.5 wide-angle camera. Now, flip your phone around so you’re facing your rear cameras, hold your phone up, and snap a selfie with the volume button. (If it’s a bit difficult, use your camera app’s timer.) You won’t be able to see what you’re taking, of course, but that’s part of the fun: Your exaggerated shots will come back a little goofy (and your arm will look like a human selfie stick).
0.5 selfies aren’t new
Now, here I was thinking I stumbled upon a new trend, and maybe you reading this thinking you’ve learned about something new as well. Alas, that’s not the case. A quick Google search of “0.5 selfie” reveals this type of photography was already part of the online discussion an entire year ago. That leads me to think it was cool a while before that. So, be delicate: Don’t go telling the zoomers in your life about this “fun new selfie.” You’ll be laughed out of the room. But at least you won’t be surprised if someone asked to take a “0.5 selfie” during your next family gathering. Hell, surprise everyone by suggesting to take one yourself.
