Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall...Wait There's More Than One...

When I opened the bathroom cabinet, I realized that the mirror doors created multiple reflections like in one of our labs. When the door opens all the way like in the first picture, the two planar mirrors are perpendicular to each other and they create 3 images. An image is created each time light rays bounce off the object, hit a mirror, and then reflect into my eyes. The images in front of the mirror are real and the images on the opposite side of the mirror from me and the camera are virtual. The virtual images behind the mirrors are the same distance away from the mirrors as my finger is from the mirrors. The virtual images cannot be seen but I could see the real images if I held a piece of paper in the correct place in front of the mirror. When I opened two of the doors at the same time like in the second picture, I saw many, many images because there was an image everytime the object or an image of the object existed in front of a mirror.

A Spoon (Concave Mirror)

So when I was eating dinner, I looked into my spoon and realized that it was a concave mirror! Just like the one in the lab! When I held my spoon about an arm's length away I could see my face, but it was upside down. This is because the object, my face, was farther in front of the spoon than the focal length of the spoon. I tried to create an upright image by moving the spoon closer to my face and making the distance less than the focal length of the spoon. However, I blocked out the light by moving the spoon too close to my face and I could no longer see an image in the spoon. This is because you can only see an image in a mirror if light rays bounce off an object and hit your eyes. I tried using a smaller object, my finger, and I could see the inverted image of my finger turn into an upright image as I moved my finger closer to the spoon. The distance at which the inverted image of my finger turned into an upright image is the focal length of the spoon. Since the spoon has a reflective surface on both sides, the other side of the spoon is also a mirror. The other side is a convex mirror. This mirror also distorted the image of my face, but as opposed to the image in the concave mirror, the image of my face was still upright with a bigger nose and smaller objects around me.