He did a lot with photography in high school, and has actually taken quite a few engagement pictures in his lifetime...
When we dressed up for our black tie dinner, I wanted him to take a picture of me. I explained to him my "vision" of what I wanted. I wanted the back of my dress, with the sun setting... and a cool solar flare.
This was his interpretation of that:
No Photoshop needed. The picture is as is, out of the camera.
It's difficult to tell with my watermark frame around the photo... but the picture gets dark on the edges, and turns completely black. Almost like a vignette. Okay, what am I saying? It's EXACTLY what a vignette is. I'm just tired I guess.
How does this happen without Photoshop? Well, I was reading about it in my camera's manual when I first got it... and it has something to do with the Full Frame sensor mixed with my lens when shooting wide. In my camera, there is a setting called "Peripheral Illumination Correction." The manual suggests enabling the correction to get rid of the dark around the edges. It makes it so that the light falls more evenly over the sensor. I'm a person who likes vignetting... so I disabled it. After using my camera for awhile, I can see why the feature is there, and have since re-enabled the feature. There are some instances where you definitely don't want the edges to go black, but need to shoot wide open. And, since I have photoshop, it's an easy add IF I do want vignetting!
Here is an excerpt about it taken from the Canon website for all you photography gurus who actually care and know what I'm talking about!
"Virtually all camera lenses are designed so that the volume of light
transmitted to the image sensor tends to decrease somewhat from the
center of the image to the corners. Many different terms are used to
describe this phenomenon, such as “vignetting,” “light fall-off,”
“unevenness of illumination,” etc. Most experienced photographers are
well aware of this common lens performance characteristic, and some
take advantage of it for creative effects. Vignetting, for example, has
been a popular artistic technique for centuries. It draws attention to
a well-lit main subject by darkening the areas surrounding it.
Intentional vignetting can be effective in a wide variety of
photographic applications, including landscapes, portraiture, and
advertising photography to name a few.
However, there are many other shooting situations where uneven
peripheral illumination can be very distracting and undesirable.
Examples include aerial photography, sports photography, seascapes, and
any other kind of composition where consistent, even illumination
across the frame is preferred. For these situations, the less falloff
there is in an image, the better. Generally speaking, uneven peripheral
illumination or light falloff is at its worst at the maximum aperture
of the lens, whatever that happens to be. It could be f/1.2 with a fast
prime lens, f/2.8 with a professional zoom lens, or even f/5.6 with a
consumer-grade zoom lens. In most cases, peripheral illumination is
also affected by the distance setting – it gets worse at infinity
because the entire coverage of the lens is being used, but it gets
better at closer distances because the lens is projecting a larger
image towards the image sensor and as a result the sensor is
effectively seeing a cropped view. In almost all cases, uneven
peripheral illumination quickly diminishes as the aperture of the lens
is stopped down. For most high-quality lenses today, uneven peripheral
illumination is no longer a concern once the lens is stopped down by a
couple of f/stops or more."
