Lens for architectural photography

hubert1602 · May 7, 2015

Hello I am looking for advise what kind of lens I should buy. Now I have nikon D5300 with standard lens 18-55 mm. But in many situation this lens is not enough to shot a photo of whole building, that's way I am thinking now to buy some lens with wider angle. Price is very important aspect for me and I can't afford myself to buy lens with tilt shift( prices of this lenses are ridiculous). Now I am thinking on Nikon 10 -24mm f/3.5-4.5G ED AF-S DX Nikkor Wide-Angle Zoom. Is it good choice? or I should consider to buy another lens? I would be very grateful for any help

JoeW · May 7, 2015

I'm going to assume that you're shooting interiors (b/c if the problem is getting the entire building exterior into the frame, you use your feet to adjust the shot). Since you can't afford to buy a tilt-shift lens, I suggest you stay with what you have. Instead, there is other equipment that is vital to shooting interiors. A really good tripod is essential. A couple of good speed lights with filters or gels are very useful (you can put them outside to simulate a sunrise or sunset and add a lovely tint to the room). A shutter release cable or something similar is also critical.

astroNikon · May 7, 2015

hubert1602 said:
... But in many situation this lens is not enough to shot a photo of whole building, that's way I am thinking now to buy some lens with wider angle. Price is very important aspect for me and I can't afford myself to buy lens with tilt shift( prices of this lenses are ridiculous). Now I am thinking on Nikon 10 -24mm f/3.5-4.5G ED AF-S DX Nikkor Wide-Angle Zoom. Is it good choice? or I should consider to buy another lens? I would be very grateful for any help

I'm assuming he means the OUTSIDE of a building, to capture the entire building. So, yes the lens you listed is good for this.

The cheapest method is to move back. But when you can't you can also change perspective - shooting from the side to get an angle of the building.
But when that isn't enough then you need a wider lens, such as the one that you mentioned.

Also, a TiltShift (I don't have one but want one) allows you to change the "perspective" in a sense. IE a WideAngle will have distortion. A Tilt-Shift helps to minimize that. Software also allows you to correct that.

I've taken a lot of building pictures and always have to use the vertical and horizontal corrections for buildings to make them look better top to bottom.

astroNikon · May 7, 2015

Could also learn how to do panorama's.

NCspotter · May 7, 2015

astroNikon said:
Could also learn how to do panorama's.

You beat me to it! Yeah, I'd recommend trying to take a panorama, and if that isn't working out, then look at buying a wide angle lens.

TCampbell · May 7, 2015

I'm not sure a tilt-shift on a crop-frame would work out anyway. Nikon makes a 24mm, 45mm, and 85mm tilt-shift (they call it "perspective control" or "PC"). Schneider makes a 28mm (two actually) and 90mm. All of those will be in the "thousands" of dollars price range.

Rokinon has a budget tilt-shift... 24mm f/3.5 in Nikon mount for the bargain basement price of $759. Roger at LensRentals says it's decent when stopped down to f/8... but if you plan to shoot f/3.5 you probably want the Nikon lens (so apparently you don't get the quality of a $1700 Nikon lens for $759 from Rokinon -- no big surprise there.)

On an APS-C body such as your D5300, a 24mm isn't particularly wide (a "normal" angle of view is close to 28mm -- so this is just a few millimeters wider.) If these are large/tall buildings then you'll need to be able to back up quite a bit -OR- you'll need a much wider angle of view than a 24mm can provide. (Canon makes a 17mm tilt-shift, but I think they're the only company that has a really wide TS lens.) On a full-frame body, 24mm turns out to be a fairly nice angle of view for this sort of thing... but you don't have a full-frame body.

The biggest feature of "tilt shift" lens in architecture is ability to use the "shift" (in that mode the lens doesn't tilt... it just slides sideways to go off-axis) to control the perspective that buildings have where things tend to look like they are "leaning" backward on you.

It turns out, you can use Photoshop to perform such a correction... either through the Lens Distortion menu or through a "Transform" operation (two ways to do it that I know of.) When this operation is performed, the image is stretched and pinched into a trapezoid ("keystone") shape and that fixes the perspective problem -- and then cropped back to a rectangle so that it looks like a normal photo.

If you know you're going to have to perform such an operation, you need to leave a lot of extra space at the sides of the building -- knowing this will be cropped out of the image when you are finished manipulating it in Photoshop.

Knowing this, I'm thinking you should go for a wide-zoom and use Photoshop to correct the perspective later.

I'm not nuts about stitching together panoramas because the lens angle changes between each shot (tilt-shift lenses can actually make panoramas that don't look like panoramas because the lens shifts sideways but maintains the same direction. )