“Why are my buildings falling over?”
UPDATED March 2015 – It happens to every photographer who shoots buildings. In the image, buildings appear to lean inward. It’s the perspective of the shot and it’s because we as humans aren’t nearly tall enough to get our camera to the sweet spot to avoid this problem.
iPhoneographer Misho Baranovic helped develop one of the early iPhone perspective fix apps, Perspective Correct, to help fix this after the shot. Want to learn more about perspective, what it is, and how to correct it? He’s also written a definitive post about all about perspective.
As of March, 2015, I would recommend photo app SKRWT for perspective correction. Although there are several other photo apps that let you distort the corners of the image to help compensate for perspective, Perspective Correct was one of the first to achieve quick and easy correction by adjusting the horizontal and vertical planes of the image.
In his excellent, classic post on the old Perspective Correct Blog, Misho talks all about perspective, convergence, distortion and various means to compensate for it. This isn’t just a post for iPhoneographers. This is a reference post no matter which camera you use.
“In art and photography, Linear Perspective refers to the way lines are drawn and captured to show an objects perceived size within space. In short, how we translate real world depth into a flat picture. Linear Perspective is made up of two basic concepts, the horizon line and vanishing point. The horizon line represents the viewing angle of the observer. Vanishing points are the point (on a horizon line) where parallel lines meet (converge). For example, the point where the two sides of the straight road meet
“One of the key visual cues in Linear Perspective is that vertical lines and edges remain vertical in the scene. The only time you would have straight vertical lines coming together is if you are trying to show a triangular or pyramid shape within the scene, like the angle of a building’s roof or the shape of the Eiffel Tower.”
Although the website is offline now, we’ve linked to the original post on the Internet Wayback Machine. Read all of Misho’s classic post “Why are my buildings falling over? A short guide to perspective distortion and correction in photography.” archived from perspectivecorrect.com.
SKRWT App Store link: SKRWT – mjagielski
App Store link: Perspective Correct – SmoothMobile, LLC
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