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Photography in Rhinoplasty


Introduction

Rhinoplasty is by far the most challenging and difficult operation on the face. It requires an organized approach to preoperative preparation: careful history taking, facial analysis, photography, imaging, and operative planning. The most critical thing is always to have standardized well-taken pictures on every patient. In this chapter, the fundamentals of photography for rhinoplasty will be presented.

In rhinoplasty, photography is necessary for the ­following reasons:

  • 1.

    Medicolegal: It is a must to take preoperative pictures in all patients. In case of a lawsuit after the operation, the judge will first ask for these pictures.

  • 2.

    Clinical, research, and educational applications: The surgeon can examine the patient for a limited time but can work on the pictures as long as he wants. The operative plan can be done more easily by evaluating the pictures.

  • 3.

    Image processing: To inform the person about the appearance after the operation.

  • 4.

    Self-assessment: The surgeon can compare the results of surgery with the preoperative, morphed, and postoperative pictures to find out the results of the techniques applied in each individualized case.

  • 5.

    Communication with the patient: The patient should tell the surgeon about the changes on the nose in front of the mirror first. However, the changes done on the picture in the computer screen are invaluable to understand the aesthetic goals and explain the necessary surgical steps to the patient.

  • 6.

    Marketing: Standardized high-quality pictures taken in a studio are found to be very impressive to the patients.

Basic Concepts for Standard Photography

In digital photo cameras, the light passes from the lens and falls on sensors called complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) or charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors, which capture the image and then process these changes with a microprocessor and stores them on special memory cards. The number of photocytes (pixels) in the CMOS or CCD sequence for image capture is called resolution. The greater the pixel number, the more detail can be captured.

Camera

Currently four types of cameras are used for taking rhinoplasty pictures: cellphone, compact camera, mirrorless camera, and digital single lens reflex (SLR) camera. It is possible to take great pictures with each of them. The biggest problems with the cellphones and compact cameras start with their wide angle lenses, which can cause distortion on the nose and lack of standardization of views and light. In order to get standard high-quality pictures, it is best to use mirrorless and DSLR cameras in a studio environment. Mirrorless cameras have the advantage of usually being lighter and more compact, but there are fewer lenses and accessories. DSLRs come with a wider selection of lenses and better optical viewfinders. We will focus on mirrorless and DSLR cameras in the rest of this chapter.

The shutter speed is expressed in values ranging from 1 to 1000 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1000). The longer the shutter is open, the more light that falls on the CMOS when the shutter is pressed. In cases where there is a lot of ambient light, this time can be shortened and in low light it can be increased. There is no need to make these settings manually in automatic mode.

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