Hot answers tagged perspective
19
Those are done using the compression of a telephoto lens. Longer lenses will magnify the subject, so will make the moon look bigger. It will also make buildings and other objects bigger, but by moving yourself further away from those earthbound objects you can reduce them back to a smaller size. But you can't really get further away from the moon, so it ...
18
The flattening or compression effect is not caused by a particular kind of lens, it applies to all lens in the same way. Actually, this property of lenses applies to our own eyes as well. The factor that affects flattening is the distance from the camera to the subjects.
Consider the following exercise:
Place two friends 1 meter away from each other. ...
17
You lose a ton of resolution when you essentially crop a small portion of your image. Also because of the curvature of the image retained resolution will not be even across the image, which can wreak havoc with apparent sharpness in a print (or even just a web image).
Lastly it's a lot of post processing work you'd have to do for every image you care ...
16
A tilt-shift lens is indeed the best way to correct this effect in-camera, but even then, it can look odd if the distortion is quite high. The example you have given should be OK. If you want to do it in post-processing, Lightroom 3 now has built-in perspective correction tools. When you use them, a grid overlays the photo which is updated live, so you can ...
14
What you are seeing is the effect of viewfinder magnification. For whatever reason (probably simply to make the numbers sound better), this spec is usually given for a 50mm lens, even on APS-C. The Canon 60D, for example, has a 0.95x magnification with a 50mm lens focused at infinity. And that's why around 50mm gives you the magic double-vision effect. ...
13
When you correct the distortion in an image from a fisheye lens, you get undesirable side-effects.
You lose a lot of LOT of diagonal angle of view from cropping, to get a rectangular image out of it. See this first example (yellow indicates the largest usable rectangular area after fisheye to rectilinear conversion). So after correction, you have nowhere ...
13
"Background compression" is part of how we perceive perspective in a photograph. Images taken with a narrow field of view (longer focal lengths) will appear to have a shorter back-to-front distance than those with a wide field of view (shorter focal lengths).
It's important to remember that perspective, technically speaking, does not depend on the lens, ...
10
I believe the effect has to do with the RATIO of distances from the camera to various parts of the subject / scene. For example, if you take a wide-angle shot of a person's face, their features are exaggerated because the camera-to-nose distance might be half of the camera-to-ear distance.
On the other hand, consider the same shot taken with a telephoto ...
10
What you are trying to construct is a parallel motion panorama. Its been on my TODO List to do so far a while but I have not done it myself yet.
Microsoft ICE supports this. It is the only software which I know of to do automatic stitching of parallel motion panoramas. You will find that option under 'Camera Motion' below and to the left of the preview ...
10
That "telescopic" effect is achieved by maintaining your field of view, while simultaneously changing your focal length. This is called perspective distortion. You should be able to achieve a similar effect with two shots and a standard camera. An understanding of background compression would be useful here, and thankfully there was another question with a ...
10
It's all about foreshortening, the effect by which the depth of the scene appears compressed. Different focal lengths just permit you to be different distances from your subject and still give the appropriate framing.
Subject distance is the key value here. If you are a kilometre away from your subject, then the tip of their nose is a kilometre away, as are ...
9
Yes, you can use software like Hugin to correct this. The results may not be quite as good as a tilt-shift lens, but they will certainly good enough for printing except at the most humongous sizes. (A image like this with lots of horizontals and verticals will work great in Hugin as it will be very easy to set the control points.) Also, it will be much ...
9
You don't actually need tilt for perspective correction, only shift is relevant here. There are some shift adapters offered to go between a DSLR body and a medium format lens, these would help out as well; note though, that medium format lenses come in relatively longer focal lengths - e.g. 45mm is already ultra-wide for medium format.
An option for getting ...
8
When you shoot a panorama by only rotating the camera then you're simulating the effect of a wider field of view lens (even if you use a non-standard projection).
If you move the camera then what you're trying to produce has no equivialent in reality, i.e. its not a 2D projection of a 3D scene like most photographs, it's something else all together! Because ...
8
First, who said Fisheye lenses are cheaper than wides? Currently the old EF 15mm fisheye is sold for ~$650. The EF-S 10-22mm is slightly more than $700 now. You get all the advantages that @Mike listed from the UW, plus a zoom range. The EF 8-15mm Fisheye was just announced and I can't even find a price quote, but given it is an L lens, expect price ...
7
It is actually easier to do so with a small camera because the can produce a much greater-depth-of-field.
The only catch is that yours is a point-and-shoot, so you have no direct controls. Instead, you must trick it using a small aperture.
You can try landscape mode which often selects a small aperture. If that does not do it, you can increase the ISO too. ...
7
A much simpler way:
Open in Photoshop CS4
Use the crop tool and select the entire image
Check the "perspective" checkbox
drag the bottom corner points to the corners of your image like so:
press enter, and you will have the image with perspective corrected
Tutorial from Adobe here
To prevent this in future, apart from an expensive tilt-shift ...
7
To properly relate scale in a photograph, you need either the proper perspective or something of known size that can be compared to the rest of the scene. You have pretty decent perspective, however there is nothing near to the camera...everything is at greater distance. Additionally, there is nothing of well-known size to relate the size of the building to.
...
7
The formula you're asking for is
x = (fl * d) / s
Where s is the diagonal size of the image sensor — 43.3mm for a full frame sensor.
However, for a 12" x 8" landscape print from a 24mm lens, your viewing distance works out to be about 8 inches — not exactly comfortable — and that's if your eyes can actually focus properly.
A picture being flat ...
7
Actually to avoid distortion the opposite of what you said holds true.
Move faces or features you don't want to distort such as fingers away from the edge of the frame
Keep the lens parallel to the subject if at all possible
Step back and shoot, planning to crop to the desired framing later
Consider using the distortion to your advantage for "fun" shots; ...
6
It's really hard to get an idea of scale when most of the space in your picture is empty. You have to have objects that have a known size at different distances, so that our brain can estimate scale from stuff that we know. For example, if you had people standing (i.e. working) at different spots on that big empty space that will be a good hint.
This ...
6
It is worth mentioning the 'moon illusion' as well. The moon will look big to the human eye when close to the horizon but it is an illusion - try a photograph and see it 'shrink' to it's proper size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion
And as a direct answer to your questions, long lens and careful placement of foreground interest.
5
Many photo processing programs will have a "perspective correction" or equivalent mode that can improve the geometry of a shot like this. It may be worth playing around with this in post-processing to see how you like the results before you pop for a new lens. When framing your shot, be sure to leave a little extra room around your subject, however, ...
5
Single point perspective photography or drawings are based on leading lines running from the edges of the image "away" from the viewer, creating a sense of depth. It's a very popular technique among beginning illustrators as it allows you to keep a check on proportions and lets you "snap to a grid", for lack of a better term.
The most typical example I can ...
4
There's no way in general to do this, the depth information that is lost when a scene is projected onto the sensor cannot be replaced.
However if you're willing to make certain assumptions (such as converging lines in the image representing parrallel lines in 3-D space) you can construct a model that allows you to change perspective (this still leaves the ...
4
A few thoughts that come to mind:
the distortion in fisheyes is probably more difficult to correct due to the extreme distortion present;
they may be more susceptible to flare (wider lenses usuallly are more susceptible than more telephoto ones);
the optics may be generally of lower quality than ultra wides;
the front element will bulge out further so ...
4
Most of the actions with tools in GIMP can be undone with CTRL+Z and all the settings will be set to the values just before applying them or you can view/reapply the last action with the options from the Filters menu. Unfortunately both are not implemented for the Perspective transform tool (or any of the transform tools IIRC).
Your best option is to copy ...
4
As a photojournalist I must say I prefer a fixed aperture lens with some versatility, say a 2.8 24-70mm. This allows for more of the real world variables you run into. Wide angles are great for so many things, but it's so nice, especially in instances like you're describing, to zoom to 50mm and make a portrait.
However, portraits can be made with wide ...
4
Depending where you turn, you can:
Remove the lens. Newer lenses attach with a bayonet mount and a release may need to be pressed before it can be turned this way. Older lenses used a screw-mount and turning simply unscrew them.
Changing focus. Turning the focus-ring change the distance at which a lens is focused. This is not possible on all lenses and ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
