Why photos don’t match our faces?
We all are living in the era of social media. Considering the pandemic situation and the stay at home notion becoming the new normal, internet remains as the sole option of interaction with people. We’re seeing the world through our screens and are being seen by our cameras. But have you ever felt like you looked better in your washroom mirror than what you look like in front of the camera?
If yes, you aren’t alone to have faced that. The internet is filled with such questions. Most obvious answer to this being, we’re all habituated looking at our faces in the mirror which is actually an inverted image. But cameras don’t invert our image. As we’re used to look at our inverted images hence we find the camera clicked images subconsciously different mostly in the worse way. But this is not the answer.
The real reason lies in camera itself. Cameras we generally use possess single lens while human beings have two eyes situated approximately two inches apart. And this causes image look different in mirrors and camera clicks.
An Experiment:
Michael Richman, Physics professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, made a video during his research to show how things look different when viewed through the human eyes than camera images. He performed a simple experiment.
A mug was placed against a background. Then a picture was clicked. This picture showed how conventional cameras take pictures.
To show how human eyes view images two pictures were clicked from right and left angles, cut from the mid and then merged together to form another image. The simple reason being that our brain views the world from merged images obtained from the left and right eyes in a similar manner.
When both the final images were kept side by side and observed, there occurred a major difference. In the second image background was more visible than the first one. Which implies that background is more persistent with human eyes than camera image. As the human brain perceives images by merging images from both right and left eyes which results in a phenomena known as depth perception. And this phenomena, specific to eyes, leads to the background being more visible or in other words, object appears smaller even when viewed from the same distance for the same set of object and background.
Conclusion being that camera image makes us look bulkier than reality.
We are controlled by our subconscious mind. When we look at ourselves in a mirror we often move our face and body without being aware about it, and this makes us look at our best profile most of the time. Which means we subconsciously keep looking at the best side of our profile. But this doesn’t work for pictures. If our best profile isn’t in front of the camera then the picture is not likely to be the desired one.
Another fact is that the front camera of most mobiles consists of a wide angle lens and this leads to distortion. And due to this selfies usually don’t match our face in the mirror.
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