Why Your Selfie Doesn’t Look LIke You
Have you ever had professional photos taken but felt that you looked different than you thought? Or maybe you felt disappointed in how you looked in the professional photos? You’re not imagining things! There is a reason for this.
Because our phones are constantly attached to us, they’re the tool most people use regularly to take photos. Taking selfies or even streaming ourselves on video through our phones is commonplace, often a daily occurrence. We’ve become familiar with ourselves as we look in these photos. Most people don’t realize that there are reasons to why our selfies don’t show how we realistically look.
Use of Filters
Filters can be quickly applied to our phone selfies to make us look more attractive. We can brighten the photo, smooth our skin, add faux makeup, or even completely alter the size of our eyes and shape of our faces. As one can imagine, a person gets accustomed to and comfortable with their own appearance as it looks after a filter has been applied. It's understandable that everyone wants to put their best face forward on social media, but unfortunately over-using filters eventually makes people start to believe that they aren't attractive unless they use a filter.
Wide-Angle Lenses and Distortion
Smartphone cameras typically have a wide-angle lens, with a focal length somewhere between 18mm and 35mm. This allows the user to capture a large amount of the scene in the photo, which is helpful for when we want to take a photo of ourselves with a group of people or while showing our surroundings.
The problem with wide-angle lenses is that they cause a significant amount of distortion to the resulting photo. This type of distortion, called “barrel distortion,” causes the center of the image to appear as if it’s bulging in the center. The closer the subject is to the camera, the more pronounced the distortion. In a selfie taken with a wide-angle lens, this can make facial features in the center of the frame appear larger, wider, or elongated, depending on the angle.
Distortion in a portrait can either be flattering (when it elongates and thins the face) or unflattering (when it makes the nose appear wider or the neck appear heavier). In addition, we all know how the angle at which we hold our phone to take the photo affects how we look. Generally, a downward angle is more flattering, hides double-chin, and makes our bodies appear slimmer or smaller in comparison to our heads.
Focal lengths longer than 50mm are generally considered to give a more accurate field of view with realistic proportions and less significant distortion. Most portrait photographers will argue that focal lengths 70mm and above tend to produce photos without any degree of distortion. Longer focal lengths tend to compress facial features and can even make the face appear wider, though this isn’t often noticeable. I have found that the “sweet spot” for portrait photography is between 70mm and 135mm. I prefer wide-angle lenses for portraits taken from a distance because they allow me to include more of the background.
Selfie (left) vs. professional camera image (right)
Mirror Image
In addition to how distortion affects our appearance in a phone selfie, we are also accustomed to how we look in the mirror. After all, we have used mirrors daily for our entire lives. Our faces are not perfectly symmetrical, so seeing the reflection of what we're used to seems strange and unfamiliar. Unless the “flip photo” setting is activated, a selfie will mimic the effects of a mirror. Because our mirror image is familiar to us, we have subconsciously trained ourselves to prefer this reversed version of our faces. It's easy to forget that this is not how the rest of the world sees us.
Selfie how it was taken (left) vs. corrected reversed selfie (right)
Lack of Control
When we take a selfie, we can see exactly what expression we're making and if we're getting our own "good side." When someone else takes the photo, we are at their mercy. They might have captured an expression or angle that we don't feel is as flattering. We have control over our selfies but have little to no control over a photo someone takes of us.
As a professional photographer, one issue I have run into is that some of my clients think they don't look like themselves in the professional photos. It can come to a shock to the average person who takes a lot of selfies and looks in the mirror every day, to see how they really look when their photo is taken with a professional camera and lens and when the photo is not distorted or reversed.
Roxanne Abler - Roxanne Elise Photography is a professional photographer with a photography studio in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, serving the Fox Valley and East-Central Wisconsin.