Are you frustrated with your subjects always having red eyes in your photos? This is especially common in photos of children, due to the fact that their eyes are usually light in color. I will discuss a few ways you might be able to reduce this effect in upcoming blog posts.
The first step to reducing or eliminating red eye in your photos is to understand what it is and why it happens. Red eye is caused by light reflecting off of the retinas in our eyes. This is usually not a problem, because unlike many animals, humans do not have a highly reflective layer, called tapetum lucidum, acting like a mirror in our eyes. However, the bright light from a flash is enough to cause a reflection from our retinas, resulting in red eye. On an interesting note, the red color you see is the color from the blood vessels that nourish our eyes. While this effect is very annoying to photographers, eye doctors use it regularly to examine our eyes. Remember when the eye doctor put drops in your eyes to dilate the pupils then used a mirror and a bright light to look at them? The red eye effect is very helpful in that situation!
The easiest way to try to avoid red eye is to use the red eye reduction flash mode that most cameras have. This means that the camera will fire a quick flash off just a split second before the camera takes the picture, with a regular flash. This first flash makes our pupils contract, which will reduce the likelihood of red eye in the resulting photograph.
In my upcoming blogs, I will discuss ways to reduce and avoid this red eye effect, and I will also discuss ways to remove the red eye effect in photos that have already been taken.