Will Flash Damage Babies’ Sensitive Young Eyes?
My son at 4 weeks
Just about anyone who is good with a camera will eventually be asked to take photos of someone’s baby. If you’re a new parent, you probably take lots and lots of pictures of your new baby. In the first year of my son’s life, my wife and I took somewhere around ten thousand pictures of him. Many were portraits with lots of strobe use. This begs the question:
Can bright bursts of flash damage young babies’ developing eyes?
I’ve heard this before, and this topic came up a couple of weeks ago in the comments on my initial review of the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. Big thanks to Scott Hampton and Michael Deeter for getting the ball rolling on this one.
I’ve always operated under the assumption that flash bursts don’t do any damage to human eyes, even babies. But I thought this was an excellent opportunity to do a little digging and get some facts. Here’s what I found.
According to Dr. Arun K. Mishra, Ophthalmic Surgeon (thanks for the link Michael), flash bursts don’t do any damage to adults or babies. He says, “We even take electro-diagnostic tests for retinal function with flashes.”
I then ran across this article on NatureScapes.net written by a veterinarian and a doctor. Feel free to read it yourself, but I’ll give you the meat of it. It states that intense, concentrated beams of high intensity light are needed for long durations to damage the eyes. It’s kind of like the sun through the magnifying glass when you were a kid. That dried leaf sits happily on the sunny sidewalk, but as soon as you start concentrating the sunlight on it using a magnifying glass, that leaf isn’t so happy any more. POOF! Lord Of The Flame!
Flash bursts are extremely short and the light is diffuse rather than highly focused so they don’t pose any danger. This article also sheds more details on the retina test in the quote above and states that the test is many times brighter than a camera flash and is positioned just centimeters from the eye.
As I did more research I found more of the same. Lots of information backing up the claim that strobes are perfectly safe, and nothing showing that they are harmful.
So, what’s my conclusion?
Strobes and flashes are perfectly safe for babies. Of course I’m no M.D. (that’s my brother’s job) and you shouldn’t blindly take my word for it, although it would be nice to have this sort of power over so many people…
So what do you think? Think I’m full of it? Don’t care? Even in the face of medical evidence, are you still afraid of the unknown? Let me know your opinions in the comments.
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September 17th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Being a father of two, I also questioned this at points in my life. Thanks for the great information and answering a question that I have pondered for some time now. Very quality post!
Signing off,
Bunk Price
September 17th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Hi Tim.
I fielded this question to a senior photographer friend of mine. He assured me, also, that the flash will not do anything to the baby’s eyes. (He used to be a door-to-door children’s photographer in the eighties. Crude equipment compared to todays, or course!) Furthermore, he said, a photographer worth their salt will bounce or their flash off of something. That would effectively reduce the amount of light hitting their little eyes.
I’ll go on to say that babies are typically photographed high key or in lots of light, so it seems as if the flash would be minimal, anyway. I would just use it for a little fill, maybe set on manual to 1/64 power or so. Sure, there are the high contrast shots where the light falls off rapidly, but I’m now of the camp that the light won’t bother them.
Now, here comes the monkey wrench: I’ve seen someone susceptible to migraines being affected negatively by flash output. I’ve had a model meltdown on me before! But are babies susceptible to migraine? I doubt it, and therefore think it is safe now.
Of course there’s the obligatory disclaimer: I’m not a doctor, don’t take this as gospel, blah, blah, blah…
Ultimately, as photographers we have to take the mature stance and be responsible craftpersons and ensure that we use our gear in meritorious ways, not sloppily. Tim, good work on these articles. You’re helping to encourage that!
-Scott
September 17th, 2007 at 9:03 am
In all of the times that I’ve shot babies, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve had to point the flash directly at the subject. Bouncing the light is absolutely, possitively the way to go. See samples of bouncing the flash in the hospital at http://www.littlebabyphotos.com .
September 17th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Thanks for the comment Bunk. Glad you found the article useful!
Scott, thanks for that additional information. Bouncing light or diffusing it using a shoot-through softbox or umbrella really reduces the amount of light hitting the eyes. The diffusion spreads out the rays of light so that less of them fall on the eyes and more of them fly right by.
As for the migraines, many migraine sufferers are affected by bright light. I have the occasional migraine myself and when I do, bright light sucks. I also never go out in the sun without my sunglasses because the bright light bothers me a bit. I’ve never had a problem with flashes though. That’s an interesting point that I’d never heard before.
Michael, thanks for your additional info. Great photos by the way in case I’ve never mentioned that. I really like your angle of doing newborns shoots right in the hospital. I told my wife about that and she loved the idea.
September 17th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Michael, I bet you never leave work stressed!
-Scott
September 17th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Well, it depends on the baby. If the baby is not too cooperative, it can be pretty tough. I try to time the session so it’s right after a feeding… otherwise…
September 17th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Oops, missed the link: http://www.deeterphotography.com/cry.jpg
Sometimes babies aren’t that easy.
September 17th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Ha! Michael, love the crying baby shot. I try to get at least one really good shot of my son crying each month. I’ve gotten some real winners. It can be tough for me though, my son rarely cries…I can’t believe I’m calling that a curse…need to get my head checked.
September 17th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
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October 7th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Being a father of a 5-month old girl, I chose the Nikon D80 over the Canon Rebel XTi because of the presence of the dedicated auto-focus light. The canon uses short bursts of its built-in flash to assist focus in dark situations. That being said, it means I am really concerned about my baby’s eyes being burst at by a direct flash. I use bounced flash in 95% of my baby’s flashed photos.
November 8th, 2007 at 12:25 am
I asked my optometrist and she confirmed that flash photograghy is not harmful to baby’s,
I’m sure if it was there would be a few billion people on the planet with vision problems.
This is nothing but an old wives tale!!
November 24th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Here is my beef.
The average person coming to read your comments is not a professional photographer and just a concerned parent who uses the flash on their consumer camera and is doing a Google search about this topic.
Rarely in nature (before the past 200 years or so) did such bursts of light hit the retina so many times other than during a thunderstorm or something. It’s no wonder so many people do have vision problems nowadays I would argue Robina. If it weren’t for optics technology and surgery, we would be in a different world. Most of us who love eye-wear-fashion would have been breed out slowly. I don’t know how long ago we started manipulating glass, but lets just go back 2000 years. Did people back then have more or less vision problems than we do today? If they did I’d presume more talk of it in the bible…stories of people running into things and the equivalent of someone like me or my wife who wears contacts trying to do their daily duties without the aid of optic manipulation…yeah, tough luck, it would be a mess of a world I tell you, and they would have told us about it.
I don’t think the iris has a chance to respond to such a direct burst, and we’ve all seen it, and then camera companies started the whole red-eye-reduction, where a few lighter bursts are shot at the subject to make the iris respond so that in the photo, your retina is not burning red…
as it happens to be.
And just because the medical industry does iris test with such high levels, does not exactly mean it is good for you, you’d only subject your eyes to yhat test as the possible results could outweigh any small damage you’d do to the eye because of it. I can’t imagine the test being fun, for some reason Clockwork Orange pops into my mind, rest in peace Stanley.
So to ground myself a bit, and not make you all think I am a paranoid freak who lives in a dungeon with loads of fast film and high speed lenses, I will say this, the retina is made to burn and repair itself constantly, nature’s (or God’s for some) beautiful design, you pros out there are all correct, if light is defused, or other constant key light is present, there is no damage, but to shoot your kid in your dark house 40 times to get a good shot is not a good idea, at least within the first 3 years. There is a lot of development going on in the eyes all the way to late teenagehood.
Just ask people around you, how many people wear glasses, contact lenses or have had laser surgery? Was this always the case?
AM
November 25th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Good morning.
I wear corrective lenses, yet it doesn’t have anything to do with flashes…bad genes, perhaps. I’m also the fellow that hates carrots.
When I was a child I remember the little Kodak 110s, I believe. Little wind up things that they put the ice cube flashes on. The majority of the old pictures I see were taken either outside or without flash, and we have tons of old pictures. And the Polaroid Instamatics, oh boy! No one used them past the novelty stage, they were just too slow! (I think they even made a 3D version of it, too.
Ultimately, I think careful usage and moderation is the best way to avoid any problems.
Regards,
Scott