Psst... Your Head is on Backward!

I didn't want to embarrass any clients, so I'll humble myself for the sake of this one.

Every morning you stand in front of a mirror to fix your hair, brush your teeth, and make sure everything lines up the way it should. And every morning, without realizing it, you're memorizing the wrong version of your face.

Here is how you see me ... as you would if we were sitting across a table from each other:

Here's what I mean.

Look in a mirror and raise your right hand. The reflection raises its left. The image is reversed ... you know this ... but your brain doesn't process it that way. After ten thousand mornings, that reflected face is your face, as far as your unconscious mind is concerned. The part in your hair. The way one eye sits slightly lower than the other. The small lean of your nose. All of it, locked in ... backwards.

A photograph shows you the way everyone else sees you. And for most people, that version feels slightly ... wrong. Not bad, necessarily ... just unfamiliar. Like hearing your own voice on a recording and thinking, that can't be right.

It is right. It's just new.

You've seen this if you've ever posted a photo and a friend said "great shot!" while you quietly thought the opposite.

Here's a simple test: take a photo you're on the fence about, then hold your phone up to a mirror. Suddenly you may like it a lot more ... because now you're seeing your mirror self again, and that version feels like you.

And here is how I see me ... based on a lifetime of mornings in the bathroom mirror:

That feeling is real. The preference is understandable. But it's worth knowing where it comes from before you reject a perfectly strong image.

For those who want to go one layer deeper ...

Most smartphone cameras show you a mirrored preview while you're framing the shot ... but save the actual, unflipped image to your camera roll. So the face you compose and the face you see in the final photo are already two different versions of you. It's no wonder the results can feel slightly off.

In my studio, when someone's sitting with their arms crossed and their friends are raving over the same image, I already know what's happening. Nine times out of ten, it comes down to one thing: the part in their hair is on the "wrong" side, or their stronger eye is facing a direction that doesn't match what they see in the mirror every morning. The photo is accurate. Their reference point isn't.

The fix is simple. We flip the image, show them their mirror self, and they relax immediately. Then we flip it back ... and often, by that point, they can see what everyone else was seeing all along.

That slightly uneven nose? I've accepted it. Leaning a camera against the same eye for thirty years will do that.

And just for fun ... here's what happens when you make my face perfectly symmetrical by mirroring one side across the other. Two rights, in this case, make a very unsettling wrong:

Two wrongs may not make a right, but two rights really do make me look WRONG!..

As my portrait mentor Lou used to say ... "You're alright -- it's the whole world that's wrong."

He might have revised that after seeing the composite.

The next time you're reviewing your images and something feels slightly off, ask us to flip one. We'll put your head on straight ... or rather, backward ... just the way you like it.

*REPOST from 2014. Timeless mind-bender, important for those who don’t take a lot of selfies. Topic came up three times last week, so I had to dust it off and move up a decade.