halloween

(click on the picture to enlarge it)

Last night was Guy Fawkes Night when we commemorate burning an effigy of a Roman Catholic who tried to blow up parliament, and let off lots of fireworks. I was hoping to get out with camera and tripod and get lots of pictures of fireworks, but: I didn’t: it was just too windy!

So instead I hark back to Halloween when I was here:

http://seasideman.blog.co.uk/2009/11/01/learning-from-lanterns-7284772/

taking pictures of lanterns. I’ve noticed before that if you have a large camera round your neck, people approach you and this occasion was no exception. A rather drunk lad (at about 6PM!) shouted at me “How much for a photo?”. I told him I wasn’t selling photographs and he swore and walked on. Then the bunch in the picture above appeared and pretty much begged me to take their picture, so I did.

I had to use Flash as it was so dark, and the result was some rather nasty red-eye. The girl 4th from the left for example:

halloween2

But with a bit of simple software trickery I did this:

halloween3

Fixed! The cause of Redeye is the light from the flash going straight into the pupil of the eye, bouncing off the back of the eye and coming out again, reddened by the blood at the back of the eye. This normally only happens if the flash is close to the lens, as happens whenever a built-in flash is used. This is just one of the reasons that professional photographers tend to use a flash unit separate from the camera, or as a minimum attached to the top so that it is some distance from the lens.

Thankfully, a bit of software trickery can fix it without too much effort!

Cheers, Tom.