Giz Explains: Why You Look Different in Photos Than You Do within the Mirror [Video]

Yesterday morning, you looked good. Yesterday evening, before you went out, you’re pretty sure you looked real good. So who the hell is this schlub inside the Facebook album from last night, tagged along with your name?

It’s a phenomenon nestled somewhere between universal annoyance and urban legend: People see something different within the mirror than they do in photographs. Typically, the former is controlled, predictable and palatable, while the latter is an endless source of nasty little surprises.

So, why the disparity? The answer is complicated, nevertheless it boils all the way down to this: Your eyes, your brain, your mirror and your camera are all conspiring to sabotage your body image.

It’s the camera

The camera adds ten pounds! At a undeniable point, this obscure TV adage became folk wisdom. While this particular effect probably refers specifically to television, and specially the distorting effect of the convex curvature of older TV sets, it kind of feels to hold true for regular folks, sometimes in still pictures in addition as video.

Cameras sensors might be absorbing an identical photons as our eyes, but they’re doing so through a posh lens which may actually change the way in which you look. Most cameras, from the dumpiest point-and-shoots to high-end DSLRs, ship with lenses capable of changing to wide, zoom-ed out perspective, and tight, zoomed-in views. At both extremes, the lens plays weird-and potentially ugli-fying tricks.

A wide angle lens does as its name suggests, capturing an image spread over a wide angle. The sphere of view in a wide-angle shot is wide-wider than that of your individual eyes. In pulling this off, some lenses create a form of fisheye effect, which will bloat subjects inside the middle, and stretch those on the surface. This, however, is quickly recognizable, and possibly won’t cause to much anxiety. In other words, If the shot looks as if a still from an episode of Jackass, you most likely shouldn’t let it figure into your self-image too much.

But there’s a subtler effect of wide lenses called wide-angle distortion: Since the sphere of view is super-wide, objects practically the camera will seem large, while objects just a piece further away will seem very small. Here’s a scene from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that illustrates the effect, starting a 4:18. (NSFW, sorta.)

The net effect is an illusion of size, both width and height. Subtle, sure, however it’s there.

Telephoto lenses are typically seen as more flattering, giving the impression that the subject is flattened, and slightly compressing the width of your foremost features, like your nose or breasts. For you to wish to consider carefully before fleeing the pesky paparazzi and their fancy zoom lenses; it’s the tourist with the pocket cam whose snaps will make you look fat on the web.

Lens distortion isn’t the best way a camera can screw together with your visage. Flash illuminates subjects harshly, turning elegant faces normally accented by soft shadows into a flat, shadowless, cadaveric horror shows.

Whether these effects are annoying or used to advantage, they mean that what you spot in photos is different than what you notice within the mirror.

It’s the Mirror

I don’t mean to imply that the camera is the simplest liar, here, because mirrors are just as guilty. For one, they flip your image. The You you’re most accustomed to, then, is admittedly an actual opposite of ways you look to others. Granted, it’s an intuitive reversal, so it doesn’t bother us once we see it, however implants a self-image that’s intrinsically wrong.

On top of that, there’s the issue of perspective. People stand almost mirrors, but see their whole selves. This offers an inexpensive perspective, but a singular one: it’s the attitude of someone standing as regards to you, eyes proportionately toward your head than on your feet. This can be the angle of a partner in conversation, not a photographer. Looking a undeniable way from three feet away doesn’t mean you’ll look an analogous from 15.

It’s you

The physics of lenses and mirrors offer solutions to express problems, i.e. OH MY GOD SO THAT’S WHY MY WONDERFUL BUTT LOOKS SO FAT ON FILM! However, these explanations don’t speak to a more relatable weirdness about photography. It’s a feeling of uncanniness. It’s a sense that something in regards to the photographed self seems unquantifiably different than the mirrored self. It’s on your head.

Think concerning the act of reckoning on a mirror. It’s incredibly limited You regularly should be facing forward, in any other case you may’t see. One can always be looking slightly down at anything of your body. You can still pose for yourself, to reach one of the most flattering look. You may hide fat behind folds of clothes, or minimize an odd facial feature with a tilt of the top.

Other people, including photographers, don’t see this version of you. They see a version that you simply are rarely aware about, and which could seem wildly foreign to our ingrained sensibilities. As Slate explains , it’s rather like how people hate their own voices on tape, doubly so because we know that those foreign, goofball intonations represent that way that everyone else hears us. In photos, we see ourselves in various states of motion, in several contortions and from uncaring, neutral perspectives. Lenses may distort, sure, but in a resounding way, these uncomfortable photographs are towards reality than our carefully images within the mirror.

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This post is tagged: endless source, urban legend, Video Cameras, wide angle lens, yesterday evening, yesterday morning