The Flash Photography Field Guide

Dealing With Glasses

There’s one easy solution to the problem of nasty reflections in spectacles, and that’s to ask your subject: “Do you always wear your glasses?” If they don’t, then ask them to remove them. This is by far the easiest way of avoiding any reflections.

The reality is, however, that sooner or later you will have to deal with problematic reflections from a subject’s glasses. To understand why you see the reflections, think back to the basic physics you may have learned at school, specifically the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection.

The angle of incidence will always equal the angle of reflection, which basically means that a photon will hit an object, then bounce off, at the same but opposite angle. If the photons hit ...