If you've ever looked at a photograph and asked, "Oh god, do I really look like that?" the answer is almost certainly no. Nobody looks like they do in photos. Not even professional models. Especially not professional models. Photography is two-dimensional. It cuts both depth and time out of your perception of the subject. It's hard to judge how quickly things curve towards or away from the camera, and it's easy to snap the shutter at the one instant, right in the middle of a movement, that looks bizarre and awkward. You need a lot of practice to light things such that the shadows suggest the shape that's actually there -- or at least the shape you want -- and you still spend a lot of time sifting through proofs and throwing away all the ones that look weird. I routinely get back lots of 300 proofs from a shoot, of which like ten are worth showing to the outside world. Most of what makes people cringe about pictures is that they don't look like the imag...
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Not just any film
One of the things that really throws people about very, very old films is that there is something 'off' about the shading. Everybody knows what black and white photos look like, but Nosferatu (1922) , for example, has a very different contrast and gray-balance than Casablanca (1942) . The sky in old silents is always diffuse and cloudy, faces are always white, lips either invisible or nearly black. Guessing hair and clothing color is nearly impossible. This is not actually a problem with the quality of the film stock, believe it or not. Film is film; the sharpness issues you run into with analog TV (405/525/625 lines of resolution) or digital (SD vs HD, and the various kinds of encoding) do not exist with old stock versus new stock. Many of the transfers you've seen are appalling, but this is because the film is generally filthy, sometimes in poor condition, and the material often in the public domain. Unless someone is making a historic collector's edition, they gen...
In the eye of the camera
Turns out, the easier it is to make pictures of you come out pretty, the easier it is to get people to take pretty pictures of you. I still can't decide if that's poetically appropriate, or one of life's little ironies. If you had asked me when I was fifteen if I'd considered working as a model, I'd have laughed myself stupid. For the first 22 years of my life I was convinced that I was the exact opposite of photogenic. This was because for the first 22 years of my life, I had only ever seen two sets of pictures come out looking at all like me, or at least what people said I looked like in person. One was a set of photos taken by the dance studio where my sister and I took lessons, in costume, in the run-up to a dance recital. (In retrospect, that was a pretty big to-do for a bunch of kids taking dance lessons. I remember very little of it, aside from having the words to a couple of Cole Porter songs lodged permanently in my brain, but the costumes were elaborate, ...