Vignetting

Vignetting (pronounced vin-yet-ing), in photography at least, is the darkening of the perifery of the image. This is usually most pronounced in the corners but sometimes also follows the edge of the image.

Almost all lenses will cause vignetting to some extent and it is always most aparent at the lenses widest aperture. I'm fairly certain if you want to find out why this happens there will be something online somewhere that will tell you, but be warned it will likely contain many long words and talk about 'cos' something i didn't get when i was at school and something i certainly dont get now! This is why i'm not going to go into any more detail for it's happening than to say it's because of the body of the lens getting in the way of the light's path. It is also perhaps worth noting this is true of both the lenses you put on your camera or in the case of digital cameras the micro lenses on your sensor

Vignetting is on many occations an iritation and a few modern cameras are now equipt with a post process function for removing it. I certianly would not apreciate vignetting caused by my equipment if i was in a studio environment! Removing it in a post process can be detrimental to the final image as it is effectivly achived by increasing the gain in specific area, this will cause an increase in noise in those areas. Fortunately even the most basic modern lenses vignette only very slightly and it being removed by the camera or doing it yourself useing lightroom (or any other program with a vignette removal function) rarely causes to much of a problem

Conversly it can also be a good thing and if you are familiar with lightroom 2 or cs4 then you will have come accross the 'post crop' vignette function for darkening or indeed lightening the perifery of your images. I was really pleased when i came accross this feature as at the moment i find vignetting aesthitically very pleasing, it is very useful for focusing the attention to the centre of the image!

Here is an example of an image i have recently created useing the 'post crop vignette' feature:

This is the image without:

And here is the image with the vignette added

I hope you will agree that the darkening of the corners of this image adds a certain something, and if nothing else it does serve to focus the attention.

Here is another example with vignetting added

This would be little more than a photo of a page of the dictionary (well it still isn't) but it is certainly more aesthetically pleaseing due to the vignette!

It is very easy to do this useing software, but there a ways to do it with hardware

The first is to buy either a lens or a camera that is prone to it, there are many out there! It is most commonly asociated with toy or 'lomo' cameras such as the diane or holga but there are many cameras out there that do this! I have recently modifyed a lens from a russian camera known as the industar-69 to work on a more modern digital camera. Details of this modification and sample photos are also on my blog

The other way to create a vignette is to focus your lighting to the centre of the image this can be done fairly easily with various lighting equipment, but can also be done using many accessory flash units by setting the zoom of the flash to a greater focal length than the one you are using
Here is a photo taken at 45mm with the flash zoomed to 85mm

I hope this information has been useful to you.
Please feel free to let me know if you found this interesting or indeed if any of what i have said is nonsence!