92 — My damn lenses keep vignetting — solving vignetting problems

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #92 talks about solv­ing vignetting which is the unwanted dark­en­ing around the edges or cor­ners in your pho­tographs. We talk about 2–3 very com­mon rea­sons why even pro­fes­sional lenses that cost a for­tune, STILL suf­fer from vignetting in cer­tain cases. ‚We also talk about why many peo­ple never notice the vignetting in their pho­tographs even though it’s often there.

This is mechan­i­cal vignetting of a shot of the sky on my F2.8 24mm wide angle lens and is due to too many fil­ters in front of the lens. Shot at left at F2.8. Stop­ping down to F 5.6 (right shot) ‚helps slightly. A bet­ter solu­tion here is to sim­ply use less fil­ters, or wider ones.

Opti­cal vignetting on neu­tral sub­ject. Shot at left is at F-5.6 focused on infin­ity using the 300mm end of my 28–300 zoom. Shot at right is at F-11 focused on infin­ity using the 300mm end of my 28–300 zoom‚and the vignetting is almost gone. Both images shot with­out fil­ters of any kind. This type of vignetting can occur in some cases on almost any DSLR lens regard­less of price.‚Listening‚to the pod­cast explains why this happens.

Links /resources men­tioned in this podcast:

Cam­bridge in Colour arti­cle on lenses
Wider Cokin Z fil­ter hold­ers at B&H
Step up rings at B&H
Adapter rings at B&H
Emo­tion is the reg­u­lar assign­ment this month on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum
Back­light­ing is the level 2 assign­ment this month on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum

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Happy New Year every­one and only the best for 2011 — thanks for lis­ten­ing and keep on shooting!

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