Sunday, August 24, 2014

PhotoProject :: Straightening Out

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.” - David Hockney
I believe what David is highlighting here is that the camera’s view of the world is from a single lens with a specific perspective. We have two eyes and “see” a much richer three dimensional worlds and our vision can be influences by our expectations. For example when we are dwarfed by tall trees we know we are surrounded by autostitched panoa strong vertical world. Our camera however see a more curved representation (depending on the zoom) and we will probably notice wide angle views tend to show curves where we expect strong vertical lines. For this reason many architectural photographers go to some extreme length with special cameras and lenses to overcome this perspective distortion. The Tilt/Shift lens being very popular because they do allow control of this distortion. A number of tilt/shift filters are also now becoming popular because they can be used to create the effect of looking at a miniature world.
The zPerspector dialogueIn this vertarama, made from three *HDR photos (created by google+ autoawesome) you can see the trees enclosing over me as the camera moves higher. Ok this is pleasing in some respects but I want to show the strong vertically of these pines, so I have Tried out a plug-in for after-shoot pro called zPerspector. There are a number of similar perspective adjustment plug in fro Photoshop, gimp & even paint.net. The all perform varaiable scaling  and/or warping to adjust the image. zPerspector has a very easy to pick up approach where you can stretch and pull at each of the corner edges of your photo to thus arrive at the expected view. In my example below I am not trying to get all the trees straight and vertical (because they weren’t really) what I was looking for for trying to reproduce the strength of the trees towering over me as I remember it.
in the pines pano after striaghtening out

No comments:

Post a Comment