Picture taking problem only serious answers please?

The only way to completely avoid red eye is using a camera with a flash that can be held away from the camera. No point-n-shoot, flash-above-the-lens camera can take consistently good flash photos without red eye.

Red eye is caused by the light from the flash bouncing of the eye's retina which is blood red. That's what the camera is seeing.

With a flash (connected to the camera with a sync cord) held in your hand with your arm raised about 45 degrees to your body and the flash head aimed at the subject the flash doesn't enter the eye straight on. The flash held at an angle like this also creates shadows that "round" the face instead of the flat, washed out look of camera mounted flashes.

The other thing you can do with a more versatile flash head is bounce flash; literally bouncing the light off of an adjacent surface that reflects the light on the subject. This has the same results as above with even softer lighting.

Most cameras have red eye elminator built it . Just go through the menu and it should say red eye. That is a feature where the flash goes off once before it flashes again and the picture is snapped. Other than that, if the camera doesn't have that feature you can try using an external flash and snapping the flash just before you snap the photo. You have to tell you subjects to hold the pose because most people see a flash and relax and aren't prepared for the second one.

There is a setting on almost all cameras with flash, it has an eyeball icon, that is the "red-eye" setting.

Basically, redeye, is the reflection of blood within the eyball. When it is dark, the iris widens, and lets more light into the eye, some of which reflects off of veins. The red eye setting will make your flash stutter, making the eye's iris close a bit, than flash again for the photo, reducing the amount of "redeye"..