optimizing tilt shift for shooting buildings

[dikaiosune01]

from the cogs of my mind, to the thumbpad of my cellphone, to your helpful advice. I would like to request your assistance in this photographic scenerio. Please bear with the minor mistakes inherent with my small thumbpad.

scenerio:
im taking a picture of a building. im fairly close, and i need to take a picture of the whole building. The only way to fit the entire building in frame is to tilt the rear standard back. In this scenerio, moving backward isnt feasible.

Problem:
are there any tilt or shifts i can use to correct the perspective when the rear standard isnt parrallel with the building?

Thank you

[Brian C. Miller]

The rear standard must be parallel to what you want to correct. In this case, the building.

You can also correct an image in the darkroom, but not by too much. What you have to do is angle the easel and stop down the lens. This may stretch the print times to longer than you want to wait, though.

[IanG]

The rear standard must be parallel to what you want to correct. In this case, the building.

You can also correct an image in the darkroom, but not by too much. What you have to do is angle the easel and stop down the lens. This may stretch the print times to longer than you want to wait, though.


You can do a lot of correction in the darkroom, particularly if your enlarger allows the head and lens board to be tilted. (Most good enlargers do - Durst, De Vere etc).

Sometimes you have to compromise at the taking stage because the camera/lens combination doesn't allow enough rise in some circumstances.

Ian

[Robert A. Zeichner]

from the cogs of my mind, to the thumbpad of my cellphone, to your helpful advice. I would like to request your assistance in this photographic scenerio. Please bear with the minor mistakes inherent with my small thumbpad.

scenerio:
im taking a picture of a building. im fairly close, and i need to take a picture of the whole building. The only way to fit the entire building in frame is to tilt the rear standard back. In this scenerio, moving backward isnt feasible.

Problem:
are there any tilt or shifts i can use to correct the perspective when the rear standard isnt parrallel with the building?

Thank you

To keep the sides of the building parallel on the gg, you must keep the front and rear standards parallel to the building. Assuming your lens covers a film size larger than what you are using, you can raise the front standard until the top of the building appears on the gg. If you don't have rise or you have insufficient rise, you can achieve the same thing by tilting the whole camera back and then re- adjust the front and rear standards so they are once again parallel with the building.

That said, depending on how large the building is, you may find that keeping the sides of it perfectly parallel on the gg tends to make it look too wide at the top. This phenomenon is due the fact that from ground level, we expect there to be some foreshortening of objects we normally have to look up at to see. So, in reality, you may not have to completely correct in this instance, just enough to give the impression that the sides of the building are parallel.

[Frank Petronio]

If you can get up high on a ladder, cherry picker, or another building, try shooting from a higher vantage point.

If you find the exact center point and your camera is level, no movements are needed (provided the building is straight!). You could even use front rise to do one shot and front fall to do another and stitch the two shots together.

Otherwise, shooting with a wider lens and scanning at a higher res, you can make an extreme transformation in Photoshop that will probably look better than doing it in the darkroom.

[Preston]

"To keep the sides of the building parallel on the gg, you must keep the front and rear standards parallel to the building."

Perhaps I missed something, but in my experience, one only need keep the back (rear standard) parallel to the fascade of the building in order to prevent convergence.

Please correct me, if I'm off base, here.

--P

[ic-racer]

Perhaps I missed something, but in my experience, one only need keep the back (rear standard) parallel to the fascade of the building in order to prevent convergence.

Please correct me, if I'm off base, here.

--P

He probably meant "to keep the sides of the building parallel and IN FOCUS..."

[dikaiosune01]

Good answers guys.
Thanks for the help. Time for more large format experiments.

[Leonard Evens]

I encounter similar problems regularly, except that in my case, it is a matter of encompassing a horizontal facade and ending up with the horizontals parallel in the final image. I got myself a 75 mm lens, but it wasn't adequate for what I wanted to do. I found that I can accomplish it by taking multiple images and then merging them digitally.

The easiest case is when I can simply make two (or more) images, each with horizontals parallel, by using horizontal shifts in different directions. Then it is not two hard to merge the resulting images in a photoeditor such as Photoshop. If that doesn't work, I must make two (or more) images by turning the lens axis in different directions. So for example, one will have horizontals converging to the left and another will have them converging to the right. You can then use tools designed to merge multiple images into one panoramic image to merge the two images. I work under Linux, so I use Hugin for that purpose, but there are several tools available for that purpose working under Windows or MacOS. See
http://wiki.panotools.org
for a starting point.

When taking the original pictures, you should be careful that the center of perspective for the different images doesn't change. For that, it is very helpful to have a panoramic head to put on your tripod. I got mine from Jasper Engineering. See
http://www.stereoscopy.com/jasper/panorama-test.html
Since most such heads are designed for SLRs, you should be sure it will work with your view camera.

I include an example where I merged two images taken with a 75 mm lens, one pointed to the left and the other pointed to the right. I think I would have need a 60 mm lens or even shorter to make that iamge with one lens.

You can do similar things with vertical images, but it is harder because usually you can't find aplace to take the picture which is centered on the building vertically.

I do have to warn you that although these tools are very powerful, there is a very steep leanring cruve in mastering them.