PHOTOGRAPHY - PAINTING WITH LIGHT







Thursday, 11 November 2010

ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY - EQUIPMENT

When photographing buildings from the ground, it is often impossible to fit an entire building into the frame, without tilting the camera upwards.  This results is the top of the structure appearing smaller and vertical lines appearing to converge, this perspective increases in proportion to the angle of view.




Perspective could be eliminated by keeping the camera parallel to the ground, however, this would result in capturing only the bottom part of the building.  By keeping the camera parallel and shifting the lens, we could capture an image without perspective distortion.




Perspective Control Lenses allow the photographer to adjust the position of the subject in the image area whilst keeping the camera body parallel, therefore correcting perspective.



Keeping the camera level with an ordinary lens, results in capturing the bottom half of the building



Tilting the camera upwards results in vertical perspective



Shifting the lens upwards results in a picture of the entire building

Some lenses provide shift only and are referred to as 'shift lenses', some have tilt and shift and are called, 'tilt-shift' lenses.


Canon TSE 4528 45mm F2.8 Tilt & Shift Lens

View Cameras also offered the same type of flexibility to early photographers and are still used today, but with many refinements.  These were developed in the era of the Daguerreotype, the first publicly announced photographic process, named after Louis Daguerre.


A flexible bellows which joins the front and rear standard allows for movement in all directions.

Perspective control in software is now possible as in Photoshop's perspective and distort functions, however, some image resolution may be lost from the most distant parts of the subject.

Personally, unless I was photographing a building for historical record for example, I prefer some perspective, since it adds drama and an artistic element to a picture.  It takes the subject out of the mundane and ordinary and adds a different  viewpoint.



Amalfi Duomo
Canon EOS 5D MK11 with 24 - 45mm lens





 Interior of Naples Archeological Museum
Canon EOS 5D MK11 with 24 - 45mm lens.

Sources - web sites ; photstuff.co.uk
                                 photo.net
                                 wikipedia

1 comment:

Mr Steve said...

Hi
we have a tilt shift lens you could try and a 5x4 camera you could look at if you so wish.

Steve

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