Verified answer

No, you are wrong. The final image from a camera is not a mirror image.

The image from a camera is the same image someone sees. If you are comparing it with what you see in the mirror, obviously the mirror is giving you the "mirror image".

If you "flip horizontally" any image, you are effectively switching left and right sides. In film days, we could do the same by accidentally putting the negative in the enlarger wrong side up.

Strictly speaking cameras take images that are upside down and left swapped with right, due to the physical properties of light... In a digital camera the software/hardware system converts the image back to the image we see through the viewfinder.

Cameras don't take mirrored images.

If they did, any print in a picture would be backwards. A tree that was on the left as you looked at a scene would be on the right.

The only time I've ever reversed an image was to print it on a transfer sheet to put on a tee shirt.

I suggest spending your time learning about light, composition and exposure instead of worrying about something that doesn't exist.

The image that falls on the film/sensor of a camera is rotated 180 degrees - that's what happens when you focus through a lens. However that is not a "mirror image", as left going to right at the same time as up going to down, creates that 180degree rotation I mentioned. Top-left of what you see, hits the recording medium bottom-right, so rotating the final image back to how you would normally see it is simple.

The lens is the same as your eye in that the image is upside down until your brain sorts it out.

Cameras work on the same principal. With digital the image is sorted out in camera by software and with film it is done in printing.

My Sinar P 5x7 would give you a real headache.