"Or in other words rather then an ortho drawing, a much better guide is to use photographs of real people for reference and use your own judgment as to what looks best in a particular scene."

Sorry, but that statement is nonsense.
Yes, sounds harsh, sorry, but I´m soo fed up with these cop outs to justify that "everthing goes".
As a scalemodeller I have to be accurate to a fraction of an inch.
A model is either accurate or not.
If it´s off, I failed.

And while people are BUILD differently (Fat, thin, muscular), their PROPORTIONS are either accurate or not, too.

What a client thinks what "looks" like a teenager or not is totally irrelevant.
The only thing important is what a REAL teenager looks like.

And if you want to portray a realistic teenager, then do your homework while you create a model of one, and not just "follow your gut".

If you want to portray reality, then you must first create a realistic model of the real world. It´s that simple.

Yes, different camera settings will deliver different results, and guess what, the same happens in real live.

A 6' 3" Vicky monster doesn´t become "average" when you use the wrong camera settings.

Your camera settings might distort V3 so much that she appears to be more normal, but everything else in your picture will be then distorted, too.

If you WANT to picture a 6'3" tall Amazon, no problem with using Vicky as is.
But if you can´t be bothered creating correct replicas of reality first, don´t pretend that your renders are "realistic" in any shape or form.

You have the artistic freedom to do what you want in your renders, so feel free to create your own Bizarro world populated with unmodified V3´s and M3´s.

But you cannot change the basic laws of anatomy  in the real world just because you or your client feel like it.

Not as long as you claim to depict the real world in your renders.

Stahlratte