How would you say, 「Will you please look at this picture?」

Question

I am talking to my a teacher of mine, and would like to ask her to look at a picture I took a screen shot of this morning because one of her staff came up to us and said 「おはようございました」and we had a debate on whether or not people actually used that sentence because it seemed obscure. I was thinking it might be something along the lines of, ”この画像見てください。”

Answer 1

「この画像見てください。」

lacks the nuance that you want and sounds too direct. It is basically saying 'Look at this image please'.

Even though ください is generally translated as 'please', it doesn't have quite the same sense of imploring someone to do something. Take, as an example' 「ビールをください」. While it could be translated as 'Beer please', it could also be translated as 'Give me a beer'. ください is just a more formal way of saying 'do this for me'.

That small non-sequitur out of the way, a way to phrase it to sound more like a polite request would be to say:

「この画像／写真を見てくださいませんか。」- 'Won't you look at this image/picture?'

or, even just adding a softener to the end would help a bit (but might make you sound too chummy) :

「この画像／写真を見てくださいね。」- 'Please look at this image/picture, okay?'

As far as 「おはようございました」, it seems that this is dialectical speech in small segments of the Kanto population, but more prevalent (yet still not common) in the northern reaches (Tohoku, Hokkaido), and some people (probably the same people) think it sounds more polite in the past-tense form.