Why you look good in mirrors but not photos, solution - Professional photographer

Symptoms include:

Saying you hate having your picture taken.
Feeling like the least photogenic person in your family or among friends.
Holding onto that one great picture you took years ago.

Photographer Kim Ayres has spent almost 15 years taking portrait photos of his clients and he has a solution for you.

"As a portrait photographer, I've found about 90% of people will say they hate having their photo taken and are the least photogenic person in their family (if not the world)," he says.

"What I discovered was when I flip the image of someone on my computer, most people prefer it," he adds.

The brain thrives on routine and habit , and when something unusual happens to disrupt this system, it looks and feels wrong.

"We have spent our lives seeing our faces in the mirror, and we have become used to seeing our faces that way round. So when we reverse that image, it doesn't look right," Ayres says.

Perhaps some people are more sensitive to the small changes that happen when the image is flipped in their heads or most people don't talk about it. Either way, the face is technically not perfectly symmetrical.

Most people:

Part their hair on one side rather than the other.
Have one eye slightly larger than the other.
Have one curvier eyebrow and one straighter or pointier.
Smile slightly more out of one side of their mouth than the other.
Have a mole, scar, or facial feature on one side and not the other.

The discomfort you feel from that reversed stranger who makes you look bad in pictures is because your features are missing from the positions you are used to.

"So if your nose goes 2mm to the left, then when your image is the other way round it appears to be 4mm to the right of where you're expecting it to be. When you add all these things together when you see your face in reverse to how you expect it to be, it's you, but not you," he says.

"And that makes you feel uncomfortable. And that's because most of us are far more comfortable with what's familiar."

The good news?

Other people see you the way you see yourself in the mirror. This might not mean much for your confidence but it's reassuring.

"When you look at a family photo or group shot, everyone else looks as you expect them to - the way you see them every day. But you don't. Your face is the wrong way around to what you are expecting. So you think you are the unphotogenic one."

On the other side, other people also face the same problem.

"Meanwhile, everyone else is thinking exactly the same thing. So when you say to your sister - "you look great, but I look awful in this" - she thinks you're crazy, because to her you look fine and she thinks she's the odd looking one."

Experiment

Get a photo of yourself that you do not want to see the light of day and hold it up in the mirror.

If it looks fine that way, that's how everyone else sees it.

I followed the experiment but used a picture of myself that I think looks great. When I held it up to the mirror, it looked very wrong. So thanks to that photographer who flipped it before I saw it the first time.