Pixiq

Do buildings lean back, way back or look like they are falling over sideways, in your photos? When you photograph paintings on a wall are they pointy trapezoids instead of rectangles? Are you having trouble getting the world squared up?

Well, the old right angle is one the hardest things to get right in photography. “Squaring up” is important because it is how we see the world. The distortion in a photograph may be interesting sometimes but once you start straightening things out, I think you’ll like your photos a lot more.

Right angles and squared up images are particularly important in the photographs of architecture, interiors and art. For an artist, sending out a photo of an art piece that is all bent out of shape, is a sure way to lose a sale, it is not professional.

Automates systems have made it easy to get the correct color and exposure for a shot but they do little to repair squashed angles.

So let’s talk about how to get perspective straight.

Squaring Up Your Picture Taking

There are a few ways to get perspective under control and get accurate rectangular or square images.

The basic reason buildings look like they are falling over and paintings look like pyramids is that the camera is not parallel to the subject. There are a couple of very simple solutions to this problem. First go into your camera menu, pull up the display page, and click on the “gridlines.” This will put a grid in the viewfinder or monitor and you can align wall edges, building sides, and painting frames with the grid lines to get them straighter.

The next step is a bit more complicated. Shooting an interior space or a work of art set you camera on a tripod and crank the camera up to a comfortable eye level. For an interior photography, put a level on the flat part of the camera body and adjust the camera until the bubble is centered.

For interior work extremely wide-angle lenses are a must. The 28mm wide-angle zoom “kit” lens is just barely useful. For interior work I use 14-20mm (in 35mm equivalent) lenses. Looking at the monitor or through the viewfinder, at the interior space you might have to raise or lower the camera height to get the framing you want. Do it carefully so as you don’t tilt the camera.

For artwork, you do the same thing, except that as a first step measure the distance from the floor to the center of the artwork. Then set the camera so the lens is at this height and point it directly at the middle of the artwork. Check the grid lines and that the image looks square and you are ready to shoot. Realistically this might mean re-hanging the art lower. Unlike interior work, I shoot art at midrange telephoto settings, the equivalent of 100-135mm lenses in 35mm equivalent.

With architectural work, the problem is you cannot move buildings, which makes it hard to work with a camera set to be parallel to the vertical. The center of the building could be the tenth floor. Generally, the way to shoot is with wide-angle lenses at some distance from the building. Another solution is the perspective control lens. Nikon and others make lenses that allow you to move the front elements of the lens up and down and left and right. These are wide-angle lenses with very large “image circles.” That is, the image projected on the sensor is much bigger than the sensor, a circle that is say 60mm in diameter over a 35mm sensor. The perspective control wheels let you move the circle over the sensor and thus change the perspective. These are beautiful and clever lenses and they will set you back several thousand dollars.

Squaring Up in Processing

The alternative to squaring up images when you shoot is to fix the images in an image editing programs.

Camera viewfinders and monitor screens are small and it is easy, even after all your efforts to end up a squish off square. Therefore, the next step is repair. Load the images you’ve shot into your PC and open the pictures in the editing program where you will see in your enlarged images any distortion.

Perspective control in Photoshop, Gimp and other programs is relatively simple. Open the program and load the image into the workspace. Go to the workspace tool bar and in Photoshop, find Image, click on it, then in the drop down box click on Transform. In the Transform box, there are several options for altering the image. The one you want to use is “Distort” rather than the choice below it “Perspective.” It is a more flexible tool than the Perspective. Clicking on Distort, you are asked if you want to create a “background” layer. Click OK and then name the layer (the program offers “Layer 0” which is fine) click OK.

In the workspace, a dotted line will appear around the image. It has toggles at each corner and middle of each frame side. Click and drag on a toggle too “pull” or “push” the image. In this way, you can change to perspective of the image. It will take a little practice but soon enough you will be able to square off your images in a few seconds.

The only problem here is that sometimes in adjusting the verticals and horizontal planes segments of the original image are lost. You’ll have to deal with that issue as it occurs.

When you use any Layer tool in Photoshop, the image is a Photoshop (PSD or PDD) image file. Once you have gotten the image corrected go back to the “Layer” tab, click and at the bottom of the list of options click on “Flatten Layers.” This will return the file to a JPEG format.

Although this process seems complicated at first you’ll find that it becomes straightforward once you use it a little.  Now you are ready to face the world straight on and to stand straight up and take pictures squarely.

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To illustrate squaring up in the extreme I’ve included in the gallery before and after images of the interior of the Abbaye-de-Cassan, in Roujan, France. The church is about a thousand years old and when we were there lit with those very small work lights to conserve energy. To get any kind of shot I had to brace my little Panasonic LX3 Point and Shoot, as well as I could, against a rough block’s surface. Perspective went to hell and in the editing software; I tried to bring it back as much as possible. Look at the guy on the left and you can see how much picture information ended up lost or cropped out. If only I had a tripod with me!  

Photos and text © 2011 Steve Meltzer