Cinematogenic

the video equivalent of photography is cinematography.

And then there are people with a radio face

Telegenic.

This is a showerthought?

Do you take your dictionary with you to the shower?

But what are people called when a picture of them looks good in a movie??

I think if someone looks good in photos but not on video, they probably just have a skilled photographer.

I’ve really never seen someone who looks good in video but not still images or vice versa. The only way I could really see that is if someone only has one or two good angles but looks odd in the rest, so video would be more likely to reveal the bad angles.

I was in college for TV production almost 20 years ago, and this was the same time Facebook was just launching and only available to college kids. Between pictures on Facebook and looking at videos of my classmates in our projects, I was surprised to discover that the girls I thought looked best in person didn’t usually look as good on the monitors, and the girls that looked best on screen usually didn’t look as good in person. This carried through to my TV career. I noticed basically no one looked quite the same on screen as they did in person; some were better on screen, some were better in person, some looked good in both but they still looked a little different between the two of them.

I’m not sure what exactly causes the difference but suspect there’s a bit that comes from lighting, makeup, and angles, but mostly it comes from the lens. There’s a distortion that comes from the lens depending on the angle of the lens (wide-angle to telephoto) but also there tends to be a flattening of features through the lens. A lot of times the people who look good facing a camera have very pronounced features (prominent cheek bones, longer nose, lips that protrude more, etc.) but they don’t look pronounced in the image, they look pretty normal. In real life, though, they often look a little odd because the features are so pronounced. Conversely people who look good in person often seem to have flatter features in an image, which can look a little dull.

Some of that can be addressed with lighting and makeup, to help show better depth, but that takes a lot of time and equipment and especially for TV news that often isn’t available. A still photographer might have more options for that, so maybe that’s where someone could look good in a photo but not a video.

The only other area I could see someone being better in a photo than video is someone who looks good with the distortion of the extreme wide angle of a phone’s selfie camera. If they’re mostly taking pictures with that they might not seem as good in other media with more normal lenses.

All in all, it made me discount pictures in trying to decide if someone’s attractive or not. I’d rather look better in person than in a photo, and I’d rather be with a partner who looks better in person than a photo.