Obviously if I get some new readers I’m going to have to come up with new hands!

Excellent 1 in 100 shot there. but mostly I’m commenting because
you said ‘count on one hand’, and this makes #5.

Hope you’re polydactyl!

I bet with your full frame camera you have to deal with, worry about, and rejoice over vignetting a lot more than I do. I checked to see whether I had added any vignetting in lightroom and I haven’t, in this photo. Having taken a closer look at this one and the previous one I think that the light falloff at the edges of their faces is a happy accident of lighting.

Adding vignetting in lightroom is often a cheap way of making a photo better (or you can get an old ‘crappy’ lens!) By darkening the edges of the frame you draw the viewer to the center of the frame. I am always surprised (and slightly dismayed) at how often the vignetting slider improves my photos. It’s gone from “hey this photo could use some vignetting” to “let’s add vignetting and see what it looks like.”

I suppose if I had fancy Lightroom 2 with localized corrections I wouldn’t need to rely on the vignetting slider so much. If there’s a bright wall or a distracting street light at the edge of the frame I’ll use vignetting to tame it down. Many times I find myself sadly moving the slider back and forth, wishing that the light in the original photo was different and somehow hoping to compensate for it in post.

This rarely works.

Remember the eye goes to the brightest part of the photo first. Your monkey brain wants the brightest part of the photo to be the subject, and while you can break and flaunt this rule for the sake of breaking it, it can be hard to get a result that looks objectively good.

The real lesson I’ve been learning is that I want my subject to be the brightest part of the photo, for the most part, and not “woo, vignetting!”

Of course like anything else it can be overdone: http://www.mintweddingphotography.co.uk/yorkshire_wedding_photographers_contact.html

Just do a GIS for “wedding photographer” “wedding photography” or anything along those lines. You’ll see tons of examples, both good and bad.

Of course Geof, you need to understand why I wrote what I just did. You said “vignetting” and my brain went “Okay, here comes the brain dump on vignetting!” Pure stimulus-response; what I just wrote is what I think, not what I think you should think. If you like vignetting and want to go “woo, vignetting!” go for it.

I’m particularly interested in photos where the subject is at the extreme edge of the frame. It’s one of those things, like creative under and overexposure, that I keep meaning to try and experiment with but generally forget to actually do anything about (actually I have a creatively underexposed shot that I quite like that I took recently, although it only half counts because I did the underexposing during editing).

I find myself there, too, but I’m finding that I’m embracing negative space a lot more. And I really like this shot, man … and yes, it would’ve worked with a slightly wider lens, even if you’d had to come back and crop a bit. [Of course, you wouldn't get the vignetting you might want around the edges, but I find that vignetting at the edge when the subject is at the edge can be very hit-or-miss.]

Consider, for example, this shot of Stephen that I took quite as a mistake. There’s a lot I’d like to do in re-taking the shot to not suck, but I don’t think I’d get the happy mistake that I got.