Why do people have red eyes in flash photographs?

We've all see photographs where the people in the picture have spooky red eyes. These are photos taken at night with a flash. Where do the red eyes come from?
The red color comes from light that reflects off of the retinas in our eyes. In many animals, including dogs, cats and deer, the retina has a special reflective layer called the tapetum lucidum that acts almost like a mirror at the backs of their eyes. If you shine a flashlight or headlights into their eyes at night, their eyes shine back with bright, white light. Here is what Encyclopedia Britannica has to say about the tapetum lucidum:

Among many nocturnal vertebrates the white compound guanine is found in the epithelium or retina of the eye. This provides a mirrorlike surface, the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light outward and thereby allows a second chance for its absorption by visual pigments at very low light intensities. Tapeta lucida produce the familiar eyeshine of nocturnal animals.

Humans don't have this tapetum lucidum layer in their retinas. If you shine a flashlight in a person's eyes at night, you don't see any sort of reflection. The flash on a camera is bright enough, however, to cause a reflection off of the retina -- what you see is the red color from the blood vessels nourishing the eye.
Many cameras have a "red eye reduction" feature. In these cameras, the flash goes off twice -- once right before the picture is taken, and then again to actually take the picture. The first flash causes people's pupils to contract, reducing "red eye" significantly. Another trick is to turn on all the lights in the room, which also contracts the pupil.

Another way to reduce or eliminate "red eye" in pictures is to move the flash away from the lens. On most small cameras, the flash is only an inch or two away from the lens, so the reflection comes right back into the lens and shows up on the film. If you can detach the flash and hold it several feet away from the lens, that helps a lot. You can also try bouncing the flash off the ceiling if that is an option.

I got the detailed eplanation above from Howstuffworks.com

I also found a red eye remover software. (But I didn't try it ;)

"Safinaz" The 1959 Karmann Ghia

This 1959 Karmann Ghia belongs to one of my best friends... He's been working on her for more than 5 years and at last they are on the road again. And believe me there are not too mant Karmanns in Turkey. And when you come to think that she is a 1959... This is a rare vintage beauty.

Karmann Ghia is a Volkswagen as well and if you're interested you can have detailed information from the links below:
- Karmann-ghia.org
- Karmannghia.com
- Karmannghia.org
- Type34.org
- Karmann Ghia World

A Cold Bottle of Coke

One of the hottest days of August... You've seen a bottle of ice cold coke on the pavement. Someone must have dropped it recently... Would you like to have some coke?

Some Turkish Blogs

I was wandering around this morning lookin' at some Turkish Blogs, following the links, surfin' around. I found some new sites, new blogs, some old ones with new designs, new content... And I also searched google to learn who had linked to fikirbaz.com and find some interesting foreign sites that had links to fikirbaz.com and started to click on the links the have and find more sites and this wen t on and on and on... Now I have tens of open ie windows on my desktop that I decided to put links here but I couldn't spare any time to post in here.... Now I have to post them because so many windows on my desktop really interferes with my daily work...

Anyway, here are some Turkish blogs and sites:
- Nahnu.org
- Scheker Weblog
- Günce
- Turkish Torque
- Dipnot
- GamzeOnStage
- JupiterCrash
- Baddua
- Nikita
- Berenis

10 worst album covers of all time

Pork Tornado: The Guy You Hate To Love... I found this diary site thanks to a forwarded mail and really liked tje page: 10 worst album covers of all time

A friend of mine sent me a link the other day that has kept me entertained with what has become my first top ten list. I guess “bottom 10” would be more appropriate, since it goes from “really bad” to “crime against humanity”. The problem with the original website featuring these album covers (Kersbergen has redirected his traffic to this site after his server got all gummed up) is that they were in no particular order and no one wrote any captions. I plan to fix that. Aside from that, I thank the person who gathered and compiled these works of art.

Fragile (by Sting)

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime's argument
That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are
How fragile we are how fragile we are

Fighting with spam comments

Some people and sites do keep on writing comments that include web site urls. Generally fikirbaz.com receives aprox. 5 - 20 spam comments daily and it is not a big thing to delete them manually and rebuilding the related pages again.

Last weekend more than 150 spam comments were submited. Yesterday I wasted a lot of time to delete them all as I am too lazy to find out a better solution. But this morning I found more than 600 new spam comments and decided to work out a better solution and searched for it.

The first place I checked was Movable Type. From there I was linked to MT support forums page. I was expecting to find lots of bloggers with the same problem and bingo. In the commenting system headline I found my topic: Getting tired from the comment spams.

And here is the solution: MT-Blacklist

On the most basic level, MT-Blacklist is a general content filter. It can be used to enforce an obscenity policy or even for keeping an ex-girlfriend's name from ever appearing in the comments (these two things may in fact be considered synonymous), however when applied to the scourge of comment spam, it becomes a magnificent multi-layer line of defense.

The plugin's Search and De-spam feature also makes MT-Blacklist a powerful comment/trackback manager. It takes only two clicks of a button to wipe a massive spam attack completely off of your site and to bolster your defenses against future attacks.

I just installed MT-Blacklist. It was really easy to install and it took me just seconds to get rid of all the spam comments that were ever submitted to fikirbaz.com

And let me credit the guy behind MT-Blacklist: Jay Allen! Thanks a lot! :) (And also congratulations for winning the first prize in Six Apart's Developer's Contest with MT-Blacklist 2.0 )