It is important to understand that pictures are a 2-D version of real life. This simply means that photos tend to flatten your features or distort them due to certain angles. Also, since photos store everything, any awkward movement which goes unnoticed in real life is captured for everyone to see.
Because of how close your face is to the camera's lens, certain of your features may appear exaggerated. Photos can only capture a two-dimensional image of our true self. If your face is naturally round and soft, the flattening effect of photographs may confuse people about who you really are.
The camera lens also plays a part.
But the problem might not be your angles, it could be lens distortion. Because of the proximity of your face to the camera, the lens can distort certain features, making them look larger than they are in real life.
We are used to seeing our reflection in the mirror since our childhood. We are so used to that reflection, a real picture might look very weird to us. This phenomenon is called the mere exposure effect.
A camera also doesn't work the same way as the eyed does in perceiving light and dark tones in objects or scenes. The camera lens also changes the way a person looks in real life. Can you be pretty and not photogenic? Yes, and it goes the other way as well.
The "Correct" Representation
However, when we see a photo, we look at a 2D representation of ourselves, which is not reversed and can look different from what we see in the mirror and we are not used to the reversed face in the photo. We don't have a symmetrical face that shows no differences when it is reversed.
It's all about posing, angles, lighting and attitude! However, not liking yourself in photos is very real, and not being comfortable in front of a camera will translate to a photo easily, and create a less than perfect portrait of you.
Summary. Mirror images provide a more accurate perception of self due to the mere exposure effect, while camera images show how others see us. Selfies offer a unique perspective but can be distorted and less accurate than mirror selfies.
Hold two hand mirrors in front of you with their edges touching and a right angle between them like the two covers of a book when you're reading. With a little adjustment you can get a complete reflection of your face as others see it.
A new study shows that 20% of people see you as more attractive than you do.
If you think you look better in person than in photographs, you're probably right. According to new research by psychologists at the Universities of California and Harvard, most of us succumb to the “frozen face effect” in still photos — and it's not very flattering.
Lens width
(Think about the message on your car's passenger-side mirror informing you that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear due to the convex shape.) That same concept applies to your wide-angle lens expanding the width of your face, which can make you look bigger in close-up shots.
The answer is complicated. While mirrors can provide an accurate reflection of our physical features, they can also distort our appearance in subtle ways. Factors such as lighting conditions and the angle of reflection can also affect how we look in the mirror.
The camera lens is not the human eye
Camera sensors absorb light through complex lenses that process the world very differently from the human eye. That results in all sorts of weird idiosyncrasies.
Are we less attractive than we think? Conclusion. There are some people who overestimate their physical attractiveness, but on average, as research has shown, most people tend to underestimate how physically attractive they are.
There has been scientific evidence that attractive people underestimate their attractiveness and see themselves as average or even lower. But it's the opposite for unattractive people, they see themselves as more pretty than they actually are.
People see you inverted in real life, or the opposite of your mirror image. When you look in a mirror, what you're actually seeing is a reversed image of yourself. As you're hanging out with friends or walking down the street, people see your image un-flipped.
One major factor is that photos generally show us the reverse of what we see in the mirror. When you take a photo of yourself using some (but not all) apps or the front-facing camera on an iPhone, the resulting image captures your face as others see it. The same is true for non-phone cameras.
All photos are lies, distortions of the truth, and that goes double triple for selfies. Every photo in existence is altered and constrained by many factors, including the camera itself, the focal length of the lens we use, lighting and posing of the subject and the perspective from which the photo was taken.
Another reason why people are not photogenic in picture is that cameras over-emphasize flaws. It may even distort your features when you stand close to the lens, such as your legs or arms may look stronger than they are.
There are several reasons you might dislike looking at photographs of yourself. For starters, we perceive ourselves from one perspective and everyone else from another. Another reason that's more common than you might think is the mere exposure effect, a psychological phenomenon in which familiarity breeds attraction.
Bad lighting, bag angle, weird expressions, taken from too far away, a close up that makes your nose bigger, some cameras that seem to capture all your flaws because they're so high definition, bad cameras that alter the actual color of everything, and lets not even get started on red eye and flash.
You can take steps to make yourself less or more photogenic. Even said, some people seem to be born with innate photographic prowess, which may be related to their bone form but is more likely to be a result of their ability to relax and look normal in front of the camera.