Tuesday’s Tip #14:
This week’s tip is all about getting rid of red eye in your photos. It’s not that hard to do, when you know what’s causing the problem. What causes this freaky effect is when the flash reflects off of the retina. This happens more frequently when your subject is in a dark room and their pupils are bigger. A lot of cameras come with a red-eye reduction setting, which fires a quick pre-flash to reduce the size of your pupils. This can certainly help, but it’s not always very successful.
The most effective way to stop this from happening is to get your flash away from the lens. Since most people look through the lens when they are being photographed, their eyes will be looking almost directly at the flash if it’s too close to the lens, thus reflecting light right back from their retinas. If you have an on camera flash, this is likely your problem. The external flashes that you can put on your camera’s hotshoe will help, especially since you can aim the flash to indirectly light your subject.
If you can’t use an external flash, or direct your flash’s light in any way, try changing the size of your subject’s pupils before taking the picture. This is easily done by moving them from the darkness into enough light to make their pupils smaller. You can also ask them to look just to the side of the camera, so that the flash doesn’t reflect directly back from the eyes. Easy peasy!
Have any questions? Leave them in the comments below. Maybe I can answer your question in next week’s post. 🙂
