Buildings always seem tilted!

[Passion4Film]

Whenever I try to shoot buildings, even if I am standing on straight, solid ground (and my tripod is too if I'm using one), buildings seem to be tilted in my photos, even if it doesn't look it in real life.


Any ideas?

 

[StreetShark]

Lenses since they are round tend to do that (expesialy wide angles). I think you can get lenses made to fix that.

 

[darich]

Presumably you mean both sides tilt and lean towards each other and not because you've got the camera off the horizontal!!!

It's called converging verticals and your eye does see this but the brain can adjust for it so it doesn't look so bad. The walls are all heading for the vanishing point somewhere up in the sky.

2 ways to fix it.

• Step back and have camera horizontal with the whole building in the frame.
• Buy a tilt shift lens

the tilt shift lenses are expensive.

Wide angle lenses will allow you to be closer to the building, with the camera horizontal and have everything in the frame. The problem that wide angle lenses have is distortion of images at shorter focal lengths (assuming it's a zoom of course).

 

[Sw1tchFX]

What you're seeing is converging verticals. You can correct it to a degree with photoshop, but a Tilt/shift lens is a much better option. Better than that, a view camera.

The problem is that your film plane is not parallel to the subject plane. You need a tilt/shift lens on your SLR to fix that, or use a view camera and tilt the back of it to where it's parallel with the building.

 

[Boden]

Take a look at these perspective and distortion correction tutorials for Photoshop. Perhaps they address what you're talking about:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/perspective.htm

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/correctinglensdistortion.htm

 

[Torus34]

Film buffs who do their own processing can achieve quite a bit of correction by simply tilting the enlarging easel. It's necessary to stop the enlarging lens down to its smallest aperture to cover the increased DOF situation.

 

[Passion4Film]

I've done it in the darkroom to correct, but on digital - I don't know, it seems to be an issue when I'm shooting buildings for a long time at a time. Must be my eyes and the converging verticals you speak of.

I'm not using a DSLR, so those lenses aren't even an option, but thanks so much anyway!

 

[Sw1tchFX]

Film buffs who do their own processing can achieve quite a bit of correction by simply tilting the enlarging easel. It's necessary to stop the enlarging lens down to its smallest aperture to cover the increased DOF situation.

lol, funny story. I tried doing that once and failed.