Is my image supposed to be upside down and backwards?

I have turned my television upside-down. I find that helps to acclimate my brain to looking at image on the ground-glass.

 

(Note: I have filed for a patent on this invention: "Method and Apparatus for training for view camera visualization".)

 

I also show my prints upside-down. After all, that is the way I visualized them. Viewing them upside-down is "what the artist intended" (and the artist is always right).

"There is an old riddle about orientation. "If a mirror reverses right and left, why doesn't it reverse up and down?"

 

Martin Gardner, in his book "The Ambidexterous Universe", attempted to provide an answer: its because our eyes are oriented along a horizontal axis; however, that doesn't completely satisfy my curiosity.

 

Try this experiment: take a circular disk, mark a dot on one side near the edge. Hold the disk in front of a mirror, so you can see both the disk and its reflection. With the dot oriented towards the right, the reflection's dot will also be towards the right. With the dot oriented up, the reflection's dot will also be up. Likewise for any other orientation. Thus, there doesn't appear to be any preferencial orientation for reversing of images.

 

I think that this conclusively proves for all time that mirrors don't actually reverse images in any preferencial orientation; the appearance of such when we look at ourselves in a mirror is just a mental phenomenon.

 

Anno: Have fun when your camera arrives. Keep us posted. Meantime, I'll be busy staring into the mirror....

Our eyes actually see the world upside down and reversed. The image from our groundglasses on our retinas is thus correctly oriented (=same as the image in front of the camera). Between the retina and brain there is a conversion utility that changes the orientation upside down again. A capable brain surgeon probably could by-pass this conversion so that we can look at the unaltered image right-side up and maybe even in better quality since normally all conversions degrade the quality a bit :)

I'll just buy the over priced conversion utility that Microsoft developed. It will soon fail, and everything will be up side down again.