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.
| Like this article? | |
Bookmark it: |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 Email It To A Friend |
|
Subscribe to feed: 
|
|
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
[...] Read More… [...]
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
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Well Ali, your comparison with history is a bit strange. Lots of older people wear glasses and 2000 years ago people only lived for about 20 to 30 years. Did they need to see everything perfectly like now? Were the roads as busy as now? Maybe it is better not to compare apples with bananas.
Thanks for the info people, I just got a girl ten days ago. I will be careful and still natural light is beautiful anyway.
December 23rd, 2009 at 5:19 am
I can’t take enough photos of my adorable son Bryce and neither can family when we bring him over, and I was wondering if that can hurt his eyes since flash is used the majority of the time. I am not joking, my son is 6 months old and we have probably taken atleast a couple of thousand photos of him all together between all of us. I just need to know if he’s going to have problems, as in a lot of his photos he does look quite shocked.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:48 am
[...] take a lot more power than a typical camera flash to do any damage in that short amount of time. Will Flash Damage Babies’ Sensitive Young Eyes? | Sublime Light __________________ Edmonton Wedding Photographer Blog [...]
March 27th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
I am wanting to know about the amber colored light that comes on and shines on the surface of the baby when shooting a picture in a dark room
June 28th, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Thank you to Ali Mir. We need more people who are less cynical and who arn’t trying to get away from the facts so they can continue working with flash without feeling guilty that they may be causing eye harm. A 580EX Canon flash can fire powerful enough bursts that it can light 100 metre’s across a football pitch and it can do it as fast as is detected by your camera’s settings, i.e. shutter speed and f-stop are used to determine the flash’s power and speed! Sometimes the shutter speed is set faster to avoid people blink and in fact I don’t see how it could not be faster than a human lens can stop down in size. It is also powerful UV light. It is commonly known that staring into the sun can cause eye sight deterioration but of course being so far away from the sun you’d have to stare at it for some time to have the damage whereas those flashes above give a powerful burst of this in one fell swoop depending upon the settings on the flash head.
Babies retina’s have been burned. this used to be on the Kodak site as a warning to not use such as new born babies eyes are very slow to respond being immature. It can take quite some time before their lens stop down and thus in the meantime a powerful burst if light can get in on the back of the retina’s. As for whether it can really occur?
I really hate to kill your “safe” theory here but please see my latest blog post here about my eye injury two years ago now when a student in a flash demo (using two 580Ex Canon flashes). See how I feel after my eye was damaged to some degree and the problems I have had with such. I am a 46 year old adult not a new born baby or a child. My eyes have been reasonably good up to the accident, it just takes some time for my eye’s to focus when i look from something close up (i.e. reading) to the TV a few metre’s away. In other words the lens is slow to act. Such eye conditions can occur in people and all babies eyes are immature. if you really want to take the chance that flash cannot injure people’s eyes and fire it directly at them go ahead, but i hardly think it is a good idea to discount that it can happen…it has… to me a professional photographer. I have no other reason where telling others about it and educating them about it is concerned but to state that is what happened as I think certain safety measures should be expected when using flash.
http://www.valeriejefferies.com/boudoir/archives/1117
My post about my injury is there and it’s relatively long – scan down to the stuff about the injury.
Flash unit’s are becoming faster and brighter, not the other way around here. The potential is there and has already occurred for me and I’m not one bit happy for people to photograph babies with powerful flash without that warning. It may save some babies being blinded or wearing jam jar bottom glasses when their adults.
July 6th, 2010 at 7:33 am
..what is your brother the doctor’s opinion on this?
July 11th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Thanks so much for the information, I was worried sick. I’ve been asking around. Now I found the answer. Thank you.
December 1st, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Just to update you on my post above. I have continued eye problems still some two yrs later. I have worn glasses to correct mild myopia since age of 16 yrs and was always more short sighted in my right eye. My last eye script before my flash accident, my glasses script was:
2001
Right Eye = -0.75/-0.75×95 – Left Eye = -0.25/-0.50×62
Up to 2008 when I had my accident with the strobe I did not need to get my glasses script amended. I may have mentioned above that I had blurred vision from day two after flash accident, but my sight became less blurred over the next day or so. However, it did not recover to the above as my script was in 2001. My left eye lost -0.25 diopters to myopia (whereas my right uninjured eye was the same). I developed -0.50 diopters of astigmatism in the left eye which means I see things double at distances, or and extra lines around edges or edges are no longer sharp at distance. My right eye (always the one to be more short sighted, deteriorate more and need corrective lenses) only developed -0.25 diopters of astigmatism.
In fact when looking through my 2001 scripted lenses at distant objects, I can see the discrepancy in the left lens as distant objects do not seem as sharp in the left eye as they do in the right eye with glasses on AND off.
Neither the optician or the opthamologist felt it was a convincing enough deterioration for it to be taken seriously unfortunately. My argument there is this is just “one’ accident or incident with a flash, and several more and I guess you could say I’d wind up legally blind!
I still have a permanent black spot approx the size of a pin head in my left central vision which can be seen when i look at white flat surfaces. It never moves and is in the same location that the blurred patch was day following the accident and the same place the burned yellow rectangle was for 30 minutes following one flash from the flash head. There is more information at the link below in more detail about the accident and visuals to demonstrate what I saw in my left eye and how my eye sight was the few days following. By no means normal following a photo portrait session with a photographer. Any client would be very angry I suspect having this occur for them. Despite the optician and opthomologist not taking my accident seriously you’ll note that at 2001, it was deemed important enough to treat my left eye for -0.25 diopters of myopia! But neither of them feel a drop in -0.25 diopters for myopia or a drop in -0.50 diopters of astimatism in an otherwise good eye is a big deal! Better yet, this is my dominant eye and the one that I shoot with and look through the view finder on my DSLR, and whereas I could get away with wearing glasses before the accident at times only having -0.25 diopters of astigmatism, I now need to wear glasses due to having -0.75 diopters of astigmatism.
I hardly wore my glasses unless driving at night to see road signage clearly prior to the accident and that is part and parcel as to why I never had lens script changes. as the more you use your eye’s and the less you use your glasses, the less deterioration there is. Technically as I was using my left eye a lot for shooting and working, it should have actually had less deterioration than the right eye as per normal for me. However, this did not occur as you can see. I wanted to come back and update this thread and my suggestion is that if your using taking portraits of babies, always better to get natural light on the subject than use flash. If you have to use flash, I recommend filtering it with white tissue (if your amateur) if your taking a close up portrait. The flash I am referring to is very powerful, and pro photographers use this. I am unaware of the power of some of the flashes on the point and shoot cameras, but you may like to not expose your baby to too much flash as technically it is UV light at the end of the day and UV light (whether it is artificial or natural) is the most damaging. In fact, too much sun over the long term has been proven to cause macular degeneration, and I see no difference between that and frequent exposure to flash on a regular basis close up right now.
I have deleted the post on my blog, but updated the issue here on my facebook page for anyone wanting to have more details of the difficulties I am now having with getting my injury taken seriously by optometrist and optician.
http://www.facebook.com/valeriejefferiesphotography?v=wall&ref=ts#!/notes/valerie-jefferies-photography/eye-injury-local-health-care-is-not-good-enough-palmerston-north/163104450388696
December 1st, 2010 at 3:29 pm
and I hate to say this Robina, but ask yourself, “How would my optometrist benefit from this if they gave that advice out every day?”
Just a few more kids needing glasses on the planet than would otherwise be the case and adults needing their scripted lenses adjusting every few years is enough incentive to feed people inaccurate information when the average optometrist doesn’t study different types of light, power of light and which types are damaging sadly. Unlike your average dentist warning you about sweets and lollies being bad for your teeth and talking prevention, the average optometrist or opthalmologist doesn’t really care it seems enough to “prevent’ eye sight deterioration.
No study has yet been done to either disprove or prove it and since that is the case, I would not even trust to what your optometrist has said. But if you research the words “Flash Blindness” you will come across more information about that and in fact in most cases flash blindness is not permanent, it can cause permanent damage. I’d say that is all to do with how powerful the UV or IR light was (both of which come from flash), and how close it is to the subject.
Your average point and shoot decides the camera settings. In low light situations, it will use more powerful amounts of flash. The flash head has UV filter protection but if and when that degrades (as can be possible in some of the powerful flash heads by just popping it off continuously for more than 20 times without a break) and once that flash head degrades, the UV or IR light from the flash head can be at it’s most damaging.
Most people consulting this article will not be using the more powerful flash, but I would still use caution. In my case I had injury to my cornea, but in a small baby, I guess the type of light that damaged my eye can get to the retina’s and cause permanent damage and much worse. As a photographer I never expected to go into a class on flash and come out with worse vision than when I went in. No customer having a portrait taken does either and from a newborn or babies perspective, it is simply not worth a pretty picture with flash in my opinion.
December 7th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
I understand the auto focus mechanism uses infrared red to get the subject in focus. Is that harmful to the baby’s eyes if we focus on them? Can somebody please enlighten me? Thank you!
December 8th, 2010 at 7:03 am
If you get an answer to that one I’d love to know. All I can say is, the shape of the burn on my eye was rectangular, same shape as the head of the flash. I have no idea why but took it that it was the light coming off the flash head. I think the infrared beam is a different shape? I did wonder about that one later. Have no idea how strong the infra red is and only looked at the flash head itself degrading as it says it can in the manual if it is fired off too many times in a certain time frame.
I don’t suppose we’re going to know much about that either for a while as I don’t think these things are tested on eyes…. not even as the lights get stronger and faster. Usually infrared is used to focus in low light settings only? The infrared beam is narrow, but I had heard something about those little laser lights (what type of light are they?) being cited as dangerous even to pilots. Pilots have been flash blinded by those and I heard that they can cause permanent damage to vision?
December 8th, 2010 at 7:04 am
I’m referring to these lasers:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1063342/Airline-pilots-blinded-laser-beams-come-land.html
December 8th, 2010 at 7:07 am
they have the type that you can buy for parties (which are probably the ones they’re talking about which are gun based from china, but then there are the whiteboard pointers that lecturers use and my son told me they can hurt your eyes some if shone directly at them?
December 8th, 2010 at 8:29 am
Thanks Valerie! I don’t know much about the infrared beam from the flash. I didn’t use any flash on my little one. What I’m referring to is the focal points that we see in the view finder, and we choose where to focus from the 9 or 11 points depending on the camera. We were told that for a good portrait, we haveto focus on the eye of the subject. That is what I’m worrying about.
December 8th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
You’d have to hope that the type of infra red lighting used in cameras is weak in intensity and well filtered. Sometimes, when things are made cheaply, there seem to be problems. Something here that looked a little worrying too:
http://www.technewsdaily.com/dangerous-infrared-light-leaks-from-cheap-green-laser-pointers-1036/
December 7th, 2011 at 4:29 am
[...] Flash hurts babies ! « Nikon Rumors ForumWill Flash Damage Babies‘ Sensitive Young Eyes? | Sublime LightIs the camera flash light save for newborn baby?? – Yahoo! AnswersNew York Institute of [...]
December 29th, 2011 at 1:19 am
[...] Will Flash Damage Babies' Sensitive Young Eyes? | Sublime LightSep 17, 2007 Find out whether camera flash bursts are damaging to young babies' eyes. Related content: 7 Babies Sensitive Sites [...]