This article presents the results of applying method for obtaining formant components of vowel phonemes for the corpus of professional reading in Russian. In this paper, a review of existing areas of development of methods for obtaining formant characteristics of vowels for different languages was made. A review was also made of the extent to which formant picture patterns are used in speech technologies and natural language processing. On the corpus of professional reading CORPRES, data was obtained on formant components for 351929 realizations of vowel phonemes on the material of 8 speakers. The data obtained are grouped in accordance with the symbols in the real transcription, which was performed by phoneticians within the framework of segmenting the corpus. The formant planes represent the distribution of allophones of vowels for all speakers according to the two first formants. The variability of formant characteristics in the corpus for pre-tonic and post-tonic allophones are presented for one male speaker. The article also presents the results testifying the difference between the rounded unstressed /i/ and /a/, which are perceived by both naive speakers and expert phoneticians as /u/. As an experimental material, the recordings of reading by one male announcer of specially selected sentences, which took into account various linguistic factors, were used. Analysis of the data of the formant components of these vowels showed that the values of the first formant of these vowels are close to the values of the stressed vowel /u/ for this speaker. The closure of these vowels corresponds to the closure of /u/. The second formant values in the vowels [u], which were to be realized as [i] and [a] are different. They are more advanced in comparison with /u/.