Ophthalmic photography: a survey

Abstract

In any contemporary book on medical photography there must be included at least an introduction to one of its most specialized branches, ophthalmic photography. It should be noted that a professional ophthalmic photographer is often called upon to perform operation photography, specimen photography in ocular pathology, copy photography, as well as general patient photography. Obviously, a great number of considerations concerning the art and the science of medical photography apply also to this specific field; ethical questions involved in medical photography such as the patient’s right to privacy, their sensitivity about their physical abnormalities and infirmities, as well as their general psychological condition are certainly of equal concern in ophthalmic photography, where one is often confronted with individuals experiencing an alarming decrease in vision or even the tragic onset of blindness. Furthermore, one faces the same technical problems as in medical photography, such as films, filters, perspective, reproducibility of photographic records, and camera equipment. These problems have been thoroughly discussed in other chapters of this book, so it remains for this section to provide a survey of those techniques unique to ophthalmic photography, including both those that the general medical photographer can perform for the most part with equipment already at his disposal and those more specialized and elaborate methods which he can use to solve a particular problem. For the sake of brevity, many technical details have been left to individual investigation of the literature, for which purpose a bibliography has been provided.