A pull to the left and a lift up top, and suddenly everything looks just fine.

I can't believe you posted that without working in a "Let's Do The Time Warp" joke.

TO: Will Collier [NOT!]
RE: One Would Think...

...that the fine people at Adobe would have built SOMETHING into PhotoShop to do this for us.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

In the second image my eye is distracted by the oddly leaning tree in the forground.

Funny, my initial response when I saw the original image was to assume that it was computer generated. It's almost too perfect of a picture (and computer generated images have gotten that good).

I find the first picture more appealing. But then, I'm an iiddiioott. =)

It wouldn't let me post without mispelling that last word. What's up with that?

Actually, I think it wasn't the "idiot" it was the "whitehouse.c-m" I used in my made up e-mail address...

I like the first one better too. It has a spooky quality I associate with old castles.

One trick is to use a wider angle lens so that the sensor plane (film or whatever) can be vertical.

Old time cameras, with the lens mounted on a bellows, had an arrangement where the lens could be raised, without rotating the focal plane, but changing the field of view to include a tall building. As long as the film plane was vertical, this worked.

Yeah... not to be a pain here, but the tree on the right is not correct. If you don't have a way to correct the problem in camera (a view camera), nothing is going to really fix it later. Your best bet is staying away from a wide angle lense and sticking with something closer to a "natural" lense like a 50mm

Actually, the current version of Photoshop CS2 has a feature just for this sort of thing. Its kind of hard to find though.

On the tool menu, its under Filter/Distort/lens correction. The most helpful tool for wide angle shots is the “lens distortion”, which removes (or adds) barrel distortion.

Also available is the “remove horizontal or vertical perspective distortion”. That’s quite handy for this sort of shot too. You can also rotate the perspective through various angles.

Pretty cool stuff, and IMO, those features alone (well, combined with the new RAW processor at least) are almost worth the $550 cost for the full version of Photoshop.

How do we know the tree on the right isn't actually leaning?

I would think the hardest thing about doing this in some cases would be remembering what the scene really looked like so you could correctly recreate it.

Still, getting rid of the fishbowl look is an improvement, even if we can't guarantee it's perfect.

Dollars to donuts you were using your jazzy new 12-24 mm Nikkor lens that set you back a G note. (how I ENVY YOU, you damn plutocrat!).

The secret for avoiding this is to keep the camera level. You pointed the lens up when you shot this picture. The short lens exaggerates the convergence. But as you correctly note, you can fix a lot of different things in Photoshop.

"A pull to the left and a lift up top, and suddenly everything looks just fine."

Joan Rivers, architect.

You could also purchase a tilt-shift lens if you're going to be shooting a lot of architecture.

That's the church in Sarratt, isn't it? The one opposite the excellent Cock Inn?

Shouldn't you've listed your reference?

Weston, M. (2006). Considering Digital?. Writing Magazine, January 2006. Pg 22.

Seriously creepy coincidence otherwise.

Neat! But I think there's a slight overcorrection in the second image. The lamppost in the lower left looks tilted.

Back in the good old days, you hauled your 8X10 bellows camera to the site and tilted the bellows whilst keeping the film plane vertical. f/128 for 30 sec. on Kodachrome (ASA25), no depth of field problem. Of course the camera was on a tripod. But the images were so good. Digital is a lot easier, but the old stuff was a lot closer to art.

Cool, but now the clouds are distorted.