Eye shine with Better Beamer/flash extenders?

[dakotah_jackson]

I have done some birds using fill flash and at times the eye shine ruins a good

photo. I have seen the ads for Better Beamer flash extenders. Will these just

magnify the distance at which the eye shine occurs? Would be nice to have fill

on some stuff but if it ruins the face with the bright eyes I won't go for it.

[mark_chappell]

<I>Will these just magnify the distance at which the eye shine occurs? </i><P>

 

Yes -- and also the distance at which your flash will work, by about 2-fold. But eyeshine is

fairly easy to fix in Photoshop, if your images are digital (or scanned).

[ryan_taylor1]

The solution to eliminating eye-shine is getting your flash off the camera. The closer your flash is to the lens, the narrower the angle is between the animal's eyes and the flash/lens thereby increasing eye-shine. By putting your flash on a bracket, you increase the angle and reduce eye-shine. If you are shooting a longer distances (such as you would be doing with a better beamer) you may find that you still have eye-shine even with your flash on a bracket, but at closer distances it works great.

[karl_lehmann]

I use the Better Beamer on a flash bracket (with 580EX flash) for shooting nocturnal animals notorious for eyeshine, such as lemurs & owls. I almost never get eyeshine with the bracket, but when I have to mount the flash directly on the camera it's always a worry (with or without the beamer) unless the subject is extremely close. As Ryan said, it's a matter of geometry, not flash intensity.

 

Incidentally, I would NOT correct eyeshine in Photoshop and market it as "nature photography" - if you do, you should label it as "digitally enhanced", "digitally corrected" or something like that. Otherwise, if someone were to use it for documentary or scientific purposes, it could be misleading.

[mark_chappell]

<I> I would NOT correct eyeshine in Photoshop and market it as "nature photography" ....

Otherwise, if someone were to use it for documentary or scientific purposes, it could be

misleading.</i><P>

 

So, does this imply that eyeshine is a natural phenomenon and not an artifact of artificial

illumination?

[Matt Laur]

Mark: I've sure seen plenty of eye shine in canine, feline, bovine, equine and other critters just being out and about. If you've ever had the sun rising/setting over your shoulder, almost directly behind your head, and looked at a coyote or a fox (or a rabbit, etc) 20 or 30 yards off, at eye level... thar she shines! It's fleeting, but I've seen it many times.

[michaelschrag]

I agree with Mark. I am sure that the foundations of science and/or photo documentary would not crumble if the eye shine from an unnatural light source was removed.

[mark_chappell]

Matt: I've been out and about at dawn and dusk in lots of places over many years but have

never seen 'natural' eyeshine, although I don't doubt it's possible. I've only seen eyeshine

with spotlights, headlights, or in flash-lit photographs.

[Matt Laur]

Mark: I've caught it under fairly fleeting circumstances ... the most common, for me, is on a wood line some place. Very low angle of the sun, with the light being broken up by trees, gobo-style, is fairly common. JUST before sunset, with the animal in some surrounding cover so that you get less ambient light on its face helps. The most memorable, for me, was actually a bobcat hunting in the weeds at the edge of a field just as the sun was ducking below the horizon behind me. I made a noise, and Bob looked up to stare at me, pupils quite dialated - and, ping! - two glowing eyes. Looked like Gollum right out of Peter Jackon's Tolkein movies, only not quite so creepy!

[matt_sallis]

I find the eye reflection annoying too, and it's just as prevalent with a flash extender, but as Mark says, it's easily corrected in PS.

 

I tend to be quite a stickler for keeping the image as natural as possible, but I can't really see how correcting eye reflections in post processing counts as unnatural, but using a flash doesn't.

[walang_pangalan]

I'll add to the pile as well: the extenders, even off axis, are hardly immune from eyeshine effects. Generally, if your subject is filling the frame, it's not much of an issue. As you it gets farther away, red-eye/steel-eye/etc rears its ugly head. And unfortunately, because the extender pushes out your range, it's tempting to take the picture that will exhibit the problem! To that extent, it may be better to think of these things as 'power savers', not 'flash extenders'. And while you are at it, is that 500/4 really a telephoto, or just a low-magnification macro lens?

[.miles]

There is a well known twilight image of a lion taken by Frans Lanting that exhibits eye shine.

For my nocturnal wildlife images I do not bother to remove the eye shine as I cannot make

the image without flash and as such, the light for the image is entirely alien to the scene.

[alan_myers]

Hi Dakotah,

 

The longer your lens and the further away from your subject you are, the more distance you need to move the flash off camera to avoid eyeshine. With extenders in particular, it can be nearly unavoidable at times. But small things can change it a lot. For example, it's usually at it's worst if the animal is looking directly at you, might disappear entirely if the animal is gazing off into the distance at 90 degrees to you.

 

Still, the best way to avoid eyeshine is to position the flash as far from the lens' axis as is possible and reasonable. When you think about it, this is the reason it becomes more likely with a long tele and in situations where you would most likely be using a flash extender. The further away they are, the more parallel become the lines of sight from the lens and the flash to the subject, which is exactly the condition where eyeshine is most likely to occur. Boosting the flash's output with an extender just increases the likelihood it will occur.

 

If using a flash extender on a flash that has a zooming focal length head, try setting it to a shorter focal length, to see if that makes a difference. This sort of diffuses the light a bit, so you are in effect dialing back the amount of light reaching the subject. Setting modern flashes to minimal necessary exposure or trying the shot without the extender in place, if possible when only a slight hint of fill is wanted, may also help a lot.

 

I also see no reason not to retouch eyeshine out in PS, and have learned a number of ways to the correct for this problem. IMHO, simple retouching like this doesn't constitute digital manipulation. It's not like shortening a surf board so it fits on the cover of a coffee table book. And, don't get me started about the professional feline photographer who offers right up front on his pricing sheet to put a "bigger and fluffier tail" on his subjects , or to clone/reverse one eye so they are both equal in size and shape ($25-50! Arrgh!)

 

Finally, like Kevin wrote, there are times when eyeshine seems really appropriate. Was it also Lanting who made the image of a charging bull elephant at dusk... The image with lots of motion blur and and bright red eyeshine?