How to avoid glare in eyeglasses. Photographing people with glasses and minimizing reflections

Photographing people with eyeglasses - especially in the studio can be tough. You want to avoid glare in eyeglasses, but you also want to do cool lighting and you don't want to see reflections of your lights in the glasses. Photographing people with glasses doesn't have to be that difficult, but it is an important portrait photography technique to master if you want to get rid of glare and make great images of people wearing eyeglasses.
The challenge of photographing people wearing eyeglasses is not a new one - and the best solution that is available today is to understand how light works. In fact that is the same solution that was available decades ago when I first photographed a person wearing glasses.
Throughout my career I have come across lots of photographers who think they have tricks for photographing people with glasses. The most common one is to tilt the glasses down and honestly, that is the dumbest idea ever unless the person wears big oversized glasses - the moment you start to tilt them down - physics guarantees that the top of the glasses start to encroach on the top of the eyes and make the eyes appear smaller. I have also seen people teaching miracle photoshop techniques that don't really work that well. Honestly - you don't want to be wasting time in photoshop trying to fix glare.
Certainly if your subject only wears glasses some of the time and they are willing to remove them for the photograph - that solves your problem. Don't be afraid to ask your subject if they would prefer to be photographed with the glasses on or off. Most people don't wear glasses by choice so your not going to offend the person if you ask politely.
We all understand that light basically travels in a straight line. So the angle that a beam of light hits a reflective surface - that's called the Angle of Incidence. The angle of incidence determines the angle that the light will reflect any from that surface - that's called the Angle of Reflection. The Angle of Reflection will always be the same as the Angle of Incidence.
All of this means that light is fairly predictable, so as long as you remember this one simple rule of physics - you will always be able to keep your camera out of the the reflected light when you are photographing someone with glasses. So the solution is to make sure that the angle of the light hitting your subject is different from the angle that you are photographing them at so that the reflected light misses you completely.
That sounds pretty simple right? Actually it is. The real challenge comes in the fact that most eyeglasses are not flat surfaces - they are curved - so you will actually have several angles of reflection for every light source. That is why one of my favorite techniques is bounce flash
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