What I am doing wrong with perspective distortion?

alaios · Joined: 24 Jan 2014 Posts: 724

Dear all,

one of the things I love doing is shooting buildings... I am gettick sick with the perspective distortion (yes I am scre"�ng it every time).... Everything looks to be not straight..

I am trying in lightroom to fix it but I always end up with something that looks not normal... I change the sliders in lightroom. I fix vertical distrotion but then something else looks weird. Below some shots that I tried correcting but to my eyes still have problems...

What is your approach?

Regards

Alex

--
�The fact is that relatively few photographers ever master their medium. Instead they allow the medium to master them and go on an endless squirrel cage chase from new lens to new paper to new developer to new gadget, never staying with one piece of equipment long enough to learn its full capacities, becoming lost in a maze of technical information that is of little or no use since they don�t know what to do with it�
(written at 1927 by Edward Weston)

Excalibur · Expire: 2014-04-21

Well unless someone has a better answer..........old film cameras with bellows help also expensive shift lenses are useful, but I find it's something you have to live with...computer programs should remove most distortion, but I'm not an expert using those.

philslizzy · Joined: 07 Aug 2012 Posts: 4748 Location: Cheshire, England

Perspective distortion is normal. The closer you are and the wider the lens the more distortion you will get. 'correcting' it afterwards can make it look un-natural. and difficult to crop properly as the image will be wider at the top than at the bottom..

Try to get one vertical straight, preferably in the middle of the image. Work with perspective and use it.

Or go large format and use a rising front.

MartinCrabtree · Joined: 10 Jan 2015 Posts: 121

I've found careful framing/composition helps a lot. I often forget to actually "see" what's in the viewfinder but when I pay attention my results approach good. And then occasionally there's a happy mistake that just works in spite of the distortion/poor framing. Shooting film and being conscious of limited frames makes me pay more attention as well.