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baachitraka

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Joined
Apr 6, 2011
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3,651
Location
Bremen, Germany.
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Yesterday, I was shooting a church in Bremen, Gemany with my f=35mm at a distance where I can see the complete façade through the view finder.

For my eyes everything looked okay but later that evening I was wondering about the perspective distortions of any sort.

Is there any rule to follow that I can avoid perspective shortening or any other distortions when shooting tall buildings?
 
If you are standing close to a building and point the camera up the building will converge toward the top. Your best bet would be to get far enough away to avoid pointing the camera up if at all possible. A longer lens might be needed to fill the frame with the building or you could crop when printing.
 
Fundamentally , you must keep the film plane parallel with the building. However, without a shift lens it will be hard to also get the framing you would likely want.
 
The verticals will only be parrallel when they are parrallel with the vertical plane of the film. A shift lens is one way but another which is cheaper, but often not possible, is to move the camera to a higher position.


Steve.
 
The film plane should be perfectly vertical to avoid converging parallel lines of the building. If you cannot achieve this from your chosen viewpoint, then you must raise the camera (use a ladder or seek a higher vantage point) or back up until the building fits into the upper part of your viewfinder, and then crop the lower part in printing. The former is always the best choice.
 
The film plane should be perfectly vertical to avoid converging parallel lines of the building.

To be technically correct, the film should be parrallel to the verticals of the building. Depending on how well the building was built, these might or might not be the same as perfectly vertical!


Steve.
 
One way is to get an even wider lens that takes in more of the scene, which will allow you to capture the same photo but without having to tilt the camera. With wider lenses, you have to be even more careful about not tilting the camera.

By the way, this is true whether it's film or digital.
 
You guys took all my advice so all I can add isa good hearty 'YEAH!'.

So . . .

'YEAH!'
 
What I do if you cant shift is use a longer lens a move back as far as is feasible.

It may not be possible in my case, since there are other buildings in front of the church. :-(
 
if you are going to use an enlarger you can do perspective-fixing "stuff" when you print the negative.
some enlargers ( like a durst ) have a bellows &C to allow you to tilt/shift when you print.
you can also change the perspective by tilting the paper's plane. in both cases stop the lens down
as far as you can go ( and don't forget to have fun ! )

good luck !
john
 
Distortion goes hand in hand with 35mm. You want less distortion use a 50mm.

It's the nature of most wide angle lenses to get that wide angle by distorting the image and bending the light.

I'm no expert, but that's what I've noticed so far.
 
Anyone think of a software program like Ptlens to straighten verticals..............
 
Anyone think of a software program like Ptlens to straighten verticals..............

No. We try not to think about that sort of thing!


Steve.
 
Much like catrographers found hundreds of years back, stretching things after the fact to make them parallel doesn't work so well. The distortion you put back in is worse than the distortion you are trying to correct. Better to live with it, if you can.
 
Taking archival shots of historic buildings in dense urban environments, can be difficult. Dramatic convergences are not appropriate for portraying classical architecture, for example. There are various work-arounds but if I were shooting them for a living, not just fun, I'd opt for wide lens and a 5 x 4" monorail camera with corrective movements. If it were for my own record I'd use a 35mm or digital camera, stitch software and multiple shots.

Old black and white topographic books usually had different shots to give a feel for the building. If there's demolition or re-development work going on in a town, it's always worth having a look to see if a new vista opens up. Some views only last days and have been interrupted for hundreds of years, and will perhaps never be seen again.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I just make sure that all my photos have the same perspective of human eye. I do not know whether it is necessary in photography and by the way I do not mean the focal-length of a lens i.e., 50mm.
 
Although not perspectively accurate, some of the most impressive and intuitively compelling church shots are joiners - multiple prints displayed together to give the whole view.
You could argue that we 'see' large buildings in a number of glimpses of various details and joiners are the most honest way of showing that.
 
I think you may be a little unclear about the meaning of "perspective".

From Wikipedia: "Perspective (from Latin perspicere, to see through) in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface (such as paper), of an image as it is seen by the eye."

When we stand at ground level and look up at a building, the verticals do appear to be converging. It is just that our brain automatically corrects for that. When we take a photograph from the same position, and point the camera up to get the top of the building in the frame, the fact that the film isn't parallel to the building sometimes results in the two-dimensional photo looking strange.

If you worry about that, try an experiment. Pick up the photo and tilt the top slightly away from you. If you look at it from the right distance, the converging verticals will look natural again. This works best if you have a lighted photo in a darkened room, and the choice of angle of view and viewing distance is finicky.

The reason that this experiment can work is that the perspective shown in the photograph is accurate. It's just that sometimes we bring pre-conceived notions to how photographs should look, when "real life" doesn't even look this way.

I'm rarely bothered by converging verticals, except when looking at photographs where the geometric shape of the building is critical to the photograph's purpose. Architectural representations are an example.

A 35mm lens isn't particularly wide, so if you are using it to get the entire building in, the convergence of verticals will probably look fairly natural - in other words similar to how the building appears to the unaided, near ground-level eye. Unless your photograph is intended to satisfy the needs of an architect for his/her portfolio, or some other similarly technical purpose, or the photograph depends heavily on the geometric/graphical character of the buildings for its character, I wouldn't worry about it.
 
There's a difference between seeing in two dimensions, an image 'drawn' on flat material, and seeing with two eyes in space once the brain has re-configured everything. If you took an upward shot of a tall building to an architectural magazine for publication, chances are stacked against the photograph making it, because architects and those interested in buildings don't expect to see pyramids. They want photographs that resemble plans and provide information, even though as someone said earlier, correcting convergence places distortion elsewhere.

For someone's own work there are no rules, whatever works for you.
 
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