Vignette

Vignette

Digital photography has made vignettes easy again – they were originally the result of a common deficiency in lenses. These days, we talk about sharpness falling off towards the edges, and the image darkening in the corners, but before computer-assisted lens design, there was a fight to the death between the difficulty and cost of making a lens, and the level of optical defects that it brought to the camera.



Any lens focuses a circular image, and if we want to have a sharp image all over the frame, we use only the central part. Towards the edge, the image gets darker, and fuzzier. Although I bought my SLR Magic Hyperprime for its tiny depth of field, it’s designed for smaller sensors, and doesn’t cover a full frame completely – so the fall-off and softness can be seen pretty clearly in the image at the top (shot at f/0.95) and the next picture, shot at f/5.6. This was a novel experience for me, as I bought the lens for the sake of what it does at full aperture!

Going back to John Blakemore and his tulip pictures (did I mention a whole book of portraits of tulips when I blogged about Blakemore?), in some, he darkened the edges of the frame by spraying his background with water – an absorbent and dark material got darker, producing an out-of-camera vignette. Typically, darkroom printers give a little extra exposure to a strip along each edge, achieving the same result – but Blakemore’s approach means that printing can be more straightforward, with fewer additional exposures of the paper.



There are plenty of ways to add both softening and darkening vignettes in digital processing, and I tend to do it with Nik Efex. What leaves me a little unsure is the vogue for a white vignette. I have to say that I don’t generally like it as a look (though there are always exceptions to any rule), and it clearly doesn’t have an origin as a purely optical effect. It’s always been there as a deliberate effect…



Where does this take us? For me, vignettes are useful, but generally at their best applied subtly. Look at the three versions of the picture of inverse_expression – the vignette, whether dark or blurry, detracts from the image, as her collarbones are so much a part of the structure of the portrait… As with most techniques and special effects, handle with care.

And Happy New Year, everyone. May it be better than 2020 has been.