Red Eye

The general cause of red-eye is when the light from the flash is reflected back towards the flash from the red blood cells in the eye. People with darker eyes don't get this as much s the pigments are dark enough to mask the light. Because blue is such a weak colour, the light penetrates and reflects off the blood vessels in the eye.

Using flash off camera and away from the lens axis reduces this problem greatly.  This is difficult to achieve when using compact cameras or the built in flash on an SLR.

Another way or preventing this problem is to  reduce the size of his/her pupils - hence the anti-redeye pre-flash on many cameras.

The power of the flash also plays it's part, reducing the power and balancing the flash with the ambient daylight will go some way to avoid this problem.

There are software solutions to help correct this particular problem, one of the most powerful of programmers available is Adobe Photoshop CS2.  However it is always better to take care taking the image and avoiding unnecessary photo retouching.

Another distraction within this images is the arm in the background which leads the eye out of the image. Darkening this area of the image would help concentrate the attention to the subject.

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