Distortion

The Third Key to Good Composition

Why Does This Building Look Like It's Falling Over?

When you look thru the viewfinder or at the video screen on your camera, buildings sometimes look distorted or tilted. This phenomenon is called Parallax. It happens when your camera lens is not perfectly perpendicular to the subject. This parallax effect can be used to your advantage because it adds drama to a photo, but sometimes it makes the photo look strange.

Professional architectural photographers have special lenses that eliminate the perplexing parallax problem (try saying that 5 times fast).

Here's a solution I've found that reduces and sometimes takes the 3 P's away.

Parallax is more of a problem with taller subjects. First try to get back far enough to frame your shot while trying to keep the camera level, not tilting up or down. More than likely there will still be some effect so now turn your camera 90 degrees on its side. In your view finder or video screen try to get the building as close to the top as possible. This creates a view with a lot of foreground, but the building looks more upright and natural.

When you get the image in your computer you can use a photo editing program to crop out the foreground giving you a decent photo. Scroll back to the first photo of this building, see the difference?

Here's the same building from another viewpoint and doing the same steps.

Here's the final cropped photo. Big difference, don't you think?

Link to Lighting

Back to How to Photograph Architecture

Back Home