Best lens for photoing houses

[CCericola]

This is what I usually rent. I rent because it is a specialty lens I only use a few times a year. Rent Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L Tilt-Shift

 

[bazooka]

bazooka, I may have mis-spoken... i did mean whats the "best" lens and would any of my lenses be ok to use too? So everyone that had responded has helped me greatly : )

Then yeah, you can absolutely use what you have. Additonal lenses just give you more options and/or better quality. If it's not something you are going to be doing but once in a blue moon, I'd say stick with what you have. Perspective control lenses are not really something you would use as a general purpose lens as they are manual focus and more prone to damage because of the knobs sticking out.

Perspective control is kind of smoke and mirrors. It is the same thing as shooting wider and cropping except you don't sacrifice the pixels from cropping. The lens does this by generating a larger image circle around the sensor. If you don't need a large image, then it will work fine just to shoot wider and make sure the sensor is level and parallel with whatever structure face you want to have straight edges.

 

[manaheim]

bazooka, I may have mis-spoken... i did mean whats the "best" lens and would any of my lenses be ok to use too? So everyone that had responded has helped me greatly : )

Then yeah, you can absolutely use what you have. Additonal lenses just give you more options and/or better quality. If it's not something you are going to be doing but once in a blue moon, I'd say stick with what you have. Perspective control lenses are not really something you would use as a general purpose lens as they are manual focus and more prone to damage because of the knobs sticking out.

Perspective control is kind of smoke and mirrors. It is the same thing as shooting wider and cropping except you don't sacrifice the pixels from cropping. The lens does this by generating a larger image circle around the sensor. If you don't need a large image, then it will work fine just to shoot wider and make sure the sensor is level and parallel with whatever structure face you want to have straight edges.

But you can't always do that and get the entire structure in view... so what you say is true in theory, but in practice reasonably impossible to follow through on.

What's more is I don't think it is entirely true anyway... as you get further away from something it appears smaller... the human eye/brain corrects for this, but a camera does not, and the brain doesn't correct for it on a 2d image. Granted, this is not quite so amplified in a 2-story house, but the issue is still present just as it is in a 20 story building.

So... you really need to do perspective correction of some kind to make the image appear "true".