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Hi my name is Franc Anderson, and I'd like to talk to you about how to avoid red eye.
First of all the reasons for getting red eye. It's really simple, if the light from your
flash gun is close to the access of your camera lens, the light goes in through the pupil
of your eye, and the redness is caused by the light coming back from your retina. You're
actually photographing your retina. There are a few ways to avoid this, in compact cameras
find the menu and often you'll find that there's a function you can turn on or off to avoid
red eye. Sometimes this means that just before the camera takes your photograph there will
be several short flashes. This is to closed down the iris of your eye, and minimize the
effect of red eye. On SLR type cameras like this, the usual way to avoid red eye is to
use a gun, a flash gun like this, which clips on top of the camera. And as you can see there's
now quite a distance between the access of the lens and the access of the flash and his
is usually enough to prevent red eye completely. However if you're close to the subject, red
eye can't occur. In this case one way to avoid it is to buy a gun where you can have an attachment
like this, this softens the light, diffuses the light from the flash gun, and so prevents
red eye. There are also commercial products on the market which will clip to the front
of most flash guns, and will also do the same job. One final note, if you do want to spend
the money on an attachment such as this. There is a simple solution, a handkerchief either
fabric or paper can simply be attached to the front lens of the flash gun like so, and
presto you have a diffuser. Another way to prevent red eye is to make sure that the flash
doesn't point straight at the persons face. You have two alternatives, one is to bounce
the flash off the ceiling, providing it's white. If the ceilings colored the scene will
take on the same color as the ceiling. The alternative is to direct the flash at a wall
and bounce the light off the wall, this also is a very nice way to illuminate someone's
face. Of course the wall also has to be white.