Vignette

Vignette

You know how you can be familiar with a word and a concept, and then it suddenly turns round and bites you? ‘Vignette’ did that to me this evening.

We have vignette effects available in software, so it’s obviously a good thing. Or is it? Read a lens review, and it will note how many stops of darkening there are in the corners, even with rather expensive lenses.

I’ve definitely met it a few times: most notably, a pre-war Leitz Summar at full aperture is dark and blurry in the corners at f/2. And cheap modern lenses? Of course.



But this evening, the vignette of my standard 85mm f/1.8 stunned me. The subject was the evening sky, and suddenly, the corners looked obviously ‘wrong’. Stopping down from f/2.8 to f/8 improved matters a great deal, while opening up to full aperture made it – predictably – worse.



This isn’t a cheap lens: you currently pay £500 for it. Nor is it top of the range: the latest Sigma f/1.4 equivalent costs £999, and Sony’s own G-Master f/1.4 is three times the price. Both suffer from vignetting, according to the tests I’ve read.



The thing is, you don’t normally notice. It’s only when the subject is both light and even-toned into the corners that it’s visible, and even then, it’s not necessarily intrusive or unpleasant. I remember some time in the Eighties, John Hedgecoe, Royal College of Arts professor of Photography, did a TV series, which I wish was available on DVD. But every example image had a bit of a vignette, which pulled it up a bit from the norm.

Should you love it or hate it? Maybe it’s best to decide case by case.