Explained
Why photographs of you look the way they do
The optics and the psychology behind hating your own pictures.
Explained
The optics and the psychology behind hating your own pictures.
Almost nobody likes photographs of themselves, and almost none of the reasons are about how they look. These pieces explain what is actually happening — mirror reversal, lens distance, frozen expressions — and what changes it.
Because the mirror shows you a flipped, moving, three-dimensional face lit by whatever is around you, and a ph…
The camera is closer to what other people see, because it does not reverse you. The mirror is closer to your t…
Partly because a photograph shows an unfamiliar, unflipped version of your face, and partly because you judge …
A camera flattens three dimensions into two, which removes the depth that separates your body from the backgro…
The front camera is a short, wide lens held about forty centimetres from your face; the back camera is a bette…
Being photogenic is four learnable things: standing at the right distance from the lens, turning slightly away…
Camera slightly above eye level, subject turned thirty to forty-five degrees away with the face returning to t…
Weight on the back foot, front knee soft, shoulders angled and uneven, hands occupied, chin forward and down —…
Hold the phone slightly above eye level and further away than feels natural, use the back camera with the time…
Ask to be given instructions rather than told to relax, start with frames where you are not looking at the len…
Next step
Say in your enquiry that you find it difficult — it changes how the session runs.