I have a friend who is, by all accounts by those who have seen her in person, extremely beautiful. However, almost every photograph of her makes her look very unattractive, so much so that third parties who see them tend to comment on how funny-looking or unattractive she is. My friend is aware of this phenomenon and can’t seem to explain it.
I’m wondering if there is some reason why such a beautiful a person can appear so consistently unattractive in photos. Certainly almost everyone can occasionally end up looking a bit strange in photos (especially if they’re candid snaps taken at an awkward moment) but with my friend this seems to happen with unusual regularity. Is this a result of confirmation bias on my part, or is it possible there could be something inherent about someone which makes them totally unsuitable to non-professional photography? Is it possible that someone’s facial structure doesn’t properly make the transition from 3D to 2D? If so, why?
(I’ll start this off in GQ as there may be some factual answers here, but if the discussion degenerates into mindless speculation and anecdotes maybe a moderator will move it to IMHO or MPSIMS.)
I don’t know if this applies to the situation you have, but it is a common thing in photography. Some women, with fine, fair hair, distributed over their face and body, look very beautiful – under correct lighting and photographic conditions. For example, Marylin Monroe. The theory is this fine sparse hair functions as “light pipes”, something like fiber optics, to give the complexion a sort of glow. But you have to illuminate it correctly, and photographic properly, otherwise, I’ve just described a slightly hairy woman, which isn’t nearly as flattering.
Are those photos done by professional photographs with expensive correct equipment? The lighting umbrella alone makes a huge difference in how a person looks.
The second big difference is: how comfortable does the person feel? A good portrait photographer must be able to make the person feel completely relaxed, which is difficult in a study when you know that you have only 15 min. till the next appointment. A lot of people freeze with a deer in the headlight look when being photographed, and if all their past pictures turned out badly, they will already anticipate another bad set.
The only solution I could see would be to find an expert photographer where his personality /charm/ manner makes her feel at ease - which is going to be a long journey.
constanze, these are all amateur photos, posed or candid, taken in homes, parks, restaurants, etc. Now, I know that it’s very easy for amateurs to screw up a photo, and certainly some of the bad photos in question are due to bad lighting, bad camera settings, etc. But there are some group photos were it seems everyone looks fine except for my friend.
How is her posture? I have a fairly prominent brow, and if my head is angled down, my eyes get lost. Maybe not ugly, exactly, but tilting my head up a little bit makes it look much better.
I’ll take 300 pictures and maybe ONE PICTURE will turn out well. It happens and the more you take the chances are better you will get the shot you want. I am not a professional by any means but I love it and always have.
The camera loves faces with high cheekbones. Some very attractive people don’t have them and thus don’t photograph well. Any young lady will tell you that Trent Reznor is handsome and James Carville is not, but Carville photographs really well and Reznor does not. Cheekbones.
I thought that might be it, but I’ve heard people who have only seen her (and not heard her speak or interacted with her at all) describe her as beautiful, whereas other people who have only seen her pictures think she’s funny-looking or unattractive.
An old girl friend got her graduation pictures and wanted to retake them. I asked her why. She thought they did not look good. But they were pictures of her, that is what she looked like . I suggested she get pictures of someone else and just put those in the yearbook. Somehow I did not get it.
Look at some celebrities, Justin Timberlake is a great example, He can be very attractive, OK looking or ugly depending on HOW he is being photographed. He definately has a good and bad side.
Some people are like that.
I know one guy with the opposite problem, he looks a lot better in photographs than in person.
Please note that this is just speculation, not a factual answer.
I’ve noticed that people who photograph poorly often have an unusual smile. Either their lower lip protrudes down further than is normally the case, or their lower lip doesn’t go down as much as it should. Finally, some people’s smiles make their eyes exceptionally squinty, which also looks unattractive. Do you have any pictures of your friend not smiling? Does she look any more attractive in those pictures?
But they’ve seen her move, right? They’ve seen her smile? That’s personality, too.
Some people are very animated - always moving, always reacting, always responding to their environment. Freeze them in time and they can be quite ordinary, but in motion, they’re beautiful.
It’s just as you postulated, many faces look great in 3D, but in 2D they look wrong. You can see where a face curves back around, but the camera just makes it all look like one plane. It seems to me that the less angular (or the more regular) the face is in the spherical sense (if you understand what I’m trying to describe), the better it photographs. One of my daughters has a wide, flat-ish face which looks gorgeous in person, but in some photos looks really odd. My husband has a broad forehead which looks totally normal in person, but in photos looks like it’s exploding.
In 8th grade, I was friends with a girl who was one of the homelier girls in class. Her eyes were way too close set, her face was flat, her hair was frizz, and she also was maybe 15 pounds overweight. Near the end of the year, she told me she did modeling. I didn’t believe her, so she showed me the current issue of Seventeen magazine, where she was in 3 different ads. I could hardly tell it was her. And this was decades before Photoshop.
I have two friends who are identical twins. They look very much alike, even to people who know them well. But in photographs, they look totally different. One looks confident, relaxed, and like himself. The other always looks goofy and ill at ease.
I attribute this to the first twin being a good poser, and the second one being bad at it. He seizes up, forces his face into a smile that he seems to think is attractive, and ends up looking like a dork. He looks somewhat better in candid shots where he didn’t know he was being photographed.
Maybe it has something to do with that kind of effect?
I worked with a woman once who, in person, looked quite ordinary. But you couldn’t take a bad picture of her. The nose and brow that were so prominent on her flattened out and disappeared in photos, and her, um, mustache (thick but light hair) just turned invisible. Weird.
Hence, photogenic. To say I was a homely child is an understatement. However, I’ve rarely ever had a bad picture taken. Don’t believe me? Every drivers license I had until the Georgia DMV did in a perfect record, every single one was fantastic. I have a pretty angular face and while I’m not symmetrical, that is usually the benchmark for pretty.
My mother has rarely ever had a decent photo taken, although our faces are very similar. She is exceedingly self-conscious at times and if there is a camera aimed at her, she freezes up.
Ever see that Friends episode about Chandler taking bad photos? It isn’t far from the truth.
All my recent photos make me look like a stiff and uncomfortable, somewhat overweight, balding, middle-aged man.
The Wife says that the stiffness is because I really am uncomfortable with having my picture taken and I overcompensate wiht my posing. (I don’t know about the rest of you, but I cannot ignore the real possibility that the camera will steal my soul.)
Mindless speculation and anecdotes, here. I was organizing some old files last week and came across a session of would-be campaign photos for a U.S. senatorial candidate. She was a nice looking woman who photographed horribly.
I’ve dealt with numerous “blinkers” but she was the queen. Normally I can put people at ease and then fool them with phony 1-2-3 counts, or take the picture in the middle of giving them instructions. Did not work with her.
I even switched to an essentially silent point and shoot camera, and still couldn’t get a relaxed face. Maybe three shots out of 50 she wasn’t in the process of blinking, and those three weren’t good either.
She was mostly a placeholder candidate, selected to run against a popular incumbent, and she got creamed. But if she’d won, it would have been an interesting six years of newspaper pictures.
Beyond that anecdote, some people freeze their faces and focus their gaze in front of the camera lens. That doesn’t work. Or if they’re looking off camera they seem disturbed at what they’re looking at.
I photograph absolutely awfully (same thing on video.) My boyfriend does video for a living and owns a camera shop and he has completely failed at taking a good picture of me. Everybody says I don’t really look like that - I can only hope.
