User:MarkSweep/architectural photography

Here are some observations about common practices and conventions in architectural photography. As always, there are no hard and fast rules, so don't take this too seriously.

A lot of the architectural images on Wikipedia look amateurish. I know that people post them with the best intentions, but I think some reasonable criticism is nevertheless allowed. Here are some examples and suggestions for improvements.

Avoid seasickness
I recently came across the following photograph on WP. Not a bad picture at all, but I automatically tilt my head to the left whenever I look at it.



It helps to keep the bottom edge of the film/sensor area parallel to the ground. If for whatever reason this cannot be achieved during exposure, the image can be rotated in the darkroom, on the scanner, or using photo editing software. Perspective adjustments are harder to achieve with traditional means, but are easy to do in software. Here's an example of what the result might look like (image quality suffers, of course).



Avoid leaning buildings
Buildings generally don't lean backwards. However, leaning backwards is exactly what the building in the following picture appears to be doing.



The problem here is that the image (film/sensor) plane was not kept perpendicular to the ground during the exposure. The resulting perspective distortion can be corrected in software.



Problems with lens optics


Sometimes correcting perspective is not enough: an image may appear distorted as the result of lens optics. The image above underwent simple perspective correction, but a modest amount of barrel distortion is still visible.



Don't go overboard