Hypoxia and Medicine

Bright red eyes in a photo, can it indicate a medical condition?

I took photos of two people together, one of them had disturbingly red eyes, the other person's eyes were normal colour. I am sure I read somewhere of someone discovering a medical condition when this happened. mt, I think you might have hit on it there, the red eye reduction is turned on, it was just that I remember recently a mother noticed her daughter had one red eye, and this was a medical problem. I will try again when the substances have worn off!!

Public Comments

1. No its the flash that got them in the eyes. You can turn off the red eye using the red eye facility available on most decent cameras.
2. that's absolutely normal..it's because of the camera flash..and that's where photo applications with red eye remover comes..^^
3. Don't think so! It's more to do with natural colour of the eye and I think also the angle of it when the photo is taken. I'm not an expert, surely someone will know better but very much doubt is to do with medical stuff! ;-)
4. it is called the red reflex it is normal when the eye is dilated (in dim light room),the flashlight is reflected from the reitna. it should be bright red complete cicle.
5. it happens when the pupils are dilated....you notice this loads in photos where people are in clubs taking a lot of 'substances', interestingly enough.
6. That happens all the time. Many digital cameras have a setting to "reduce red eye."
7. "Red eye" is usually a reflection of the camera flash - possibly the other person was not as directly on to the camera's lens. What you read somewhere was that a tumour of the eye in a small child was picked up in a photograph - because one eye appeared normal and the other flat and dull - the parents could see that something was wrong and took her to the doctor. A tumour was diagnosed and the cancer was caught earier than it might have been.
8. No, it's natural. Red-eye in photos happens when the pupil of the subject is unprepared for the bright light of the flash and all the red is, is the flash light reflecting off the retina. The person who didn't have the red-eye in your photo had probably been more recently looking at a bright light him/herself, wasn't looking directly into the lens, or has naturally smaller pupils (very short-sighted people's pupils tend to open wider than someone with 2020 vision, so that may also be it). The medical condition you're thinking of might be lupus, which can cause red eyes and oddly-tinged skin, but this is not indicated by red-eye in photographs, so it was probably just the lighting!
9. no no and no it is the camera and lighting
10. I think the problem you're thinking of was a little boy had a photo taken and his eye appeared very black on the photo. It turned out he had some sort of eye tumor or something which had distorted the shape of the eye preventing reflection of light back to the camera. This reflection is the normal cause of red eye.