Pixiq

 Wide angle lenses are great for architectural photography but often create the “falling over” building look that doesn’t always create the classic look that can be produced with a view camera or a Tilt-Shift lens or as Nikon calls’em Perspective Control lenses. The upside of these lenses is that they can eliminate the “falling over” building look and when used with a tall tripod and a ladder can, depending on building being photographed, virtually duplicate what you can do with a view camera.

All that’s sound great, so what’s the downside? Price. Right now, a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II Tilt-Shift Lens is $1,800 and a Nikon PC-E Micro Nikkor 85mm f/2.8D is in the same ballpark. All that’s fine and dandy if you make your living as an architectural photographer but what if you just do it for fun and only from time to time.

The 300 year old church of San Filepe de Neri in Old Town Albuquerque was photographed using an Olympus E-5 and a ED 12-60mm f/2.8-4.0mm lens at 14mm (28mm equivalent on the Four-Thirds system) and an exposure of 1/800 at f/10 and ISO 250. There is definite perspective distortion going on caused by the lens uses and my pointing the camera UP causing a difference in how the top and bottom of the church was captured.

The effect that you see in the above is sometimes called perspective distortion and is due to the angle of view (here it’s about 82 degrees) of the image as captured being either wider or narrower than the angle of view at which the image is viewed. This doesn’t bother some people and if that’s you, just bail out from this page and look at one of my other posts. If is pothers you or just bothers you depending on the image, here’s a quick and easy way to fix it in Adobe Photoshop.

Step 1: Open the file

Step 2: Chose Select > All to select the entire image

Step 3. Drag a guide line out from the side by making sure Rulers are shown and just drag and grab and place a blue line that is truly straight up and down. (This step is optional.)

Step 4. Chose Edit > Transform > Perspective that will place handles (a little box) in each corner.

Step 5. Drag one of the top handles straight out and watch the lines in the building start to “correct themselves. You can do this by “eye” or by using one of the guide lines I suggest you drag onto the images.

Step 6: Select Image > Crop and you’re finished.

Little was lost in correcting the perspective as shown here and the original images. In fact if you know you’re going to correct perspective you might plan ahead and include some extra material on the sides that will later be cropped when the image is corrected. I finished the image buy tweaking in Nik Software’s Vivenza Photoshop-compatible plug-in.

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