How might I have improved this picture?

[Jeff_3801]

How might I have improved the verticals, on the left, in this 4x5 picture? I obviously should have altered the movements...

http://www.hiddenworld.net/images/Eastman-Georgia.jpg

-Jeff dilcher at hiddenworld.net

[Conrad Hoffman]

It looks like the camera was pointed ever so slightly downwards. Several different ways to do it, but if you keep the back vertical, and the building is vertical, the lines won't converge/diverge. The front of the camera should be vertical so the building is sharp from top to bottom, and I'd give it a slight CW twist to put the plane of focus on the buildings from left to right. You can start with the camera level, then lower the front, or point the camera down, then resquare the front and back. Last, fine tune the focus by examining the ground glass and twisting the front standard. You can do all this faster than I can clumsily describe it :-)

[Jim Galli]

Jeff, for this you should have had the front and the rear standard parallel and level. You could have used some swing to equalize the near things on the right and the far things on the left. I'm guessing you were close to this but may have had the back swung toward you at the bottom which has made the tops of the buildings loom bigger than the bottoms. Nice composition and an interesting shot.

[Jeff_3801]

Thanks for the tips. I could have sworn the picture looked good in the ground glass! How many times have I said that, then it was immediately obvious when I look at a scan/print.

Swinging the back would have only increased/decreased the relative size of the building on the right, I guess. I think I did employ a slight lens swing to focus across the face of the building, but maybe not as well as I could have.

It still seems odd that the verticals look good on the right side of the picture, for instance the telephone pole, but then look noticably horrible on the left. Maybe Conrad was right when he noted the camera may have been slightly pointed down- my head on the tripod has bubble levels, and I normally level these pretty well.

This is an old Wista field camera, and sometimes I wonder about the absolute "parallelism" (for lack of a better word) between the lens plane and the film plane, when "zeroed" out. I don't know if this would have contributed to the bad verticals on the left, however...

[g. wiley]

Keeping the back level as others suggested and maybe using some vertical shift to take in more of the power lines above and a little less of the street below would make this shot stronger. The power lines above are on the verge of echoing the lines of the support cables holding up the awning in the right side of the picture, but the negative space in the street bellow takes away from that feeling.

Maybe it's just I'm more interested more in the formalism of the web of the power lines and the awning, and less interested in pushing the feeling of emptiness and loneliness the shot conveys as it is, but I feel like I'd like to see more of what's above. Even cropping at the bottom, without shifting more of the scene in, makes those relationships stronger. Leveling the camera back with the buildings verticals will make those formal relationship even stronger.

[Tony Galt]

Are you sure that this old building is actually perfectly vertical? Any chance the left end actually leans forward?

[Michael Veit]

When I level a shot for architecture, I always fractionally err to the side of upward tilt. Even perfectly correct verticals sometimes look strange because we're so conditioned to seeing convergence.

I'd crop the shot with a slight twist to get the left edge of the building straight. The strongest vertical on the right is the pole ...and those things are always crooked ;-)

[Alan Davenport]

I carry a small torpedo level in my camera bag (my field camera doesn't have levels) and before taking any shot involving verticals (like buildings) I always ensure that the back is vertical. Any camera movements start from that point.

[Ken Lee]

This sort of thing can be corrected in Photoshop.

[Ken Lee]

This took around 20 seconds, and it's not perfectly corrected - but I don't use this tool very often. With a little more time, it could have been better corrected. If the original image had more pixels to start with, sufficient detail would have been retained.

I use a monorail with built-in levels, but this tool is handy to repair snapshots and mistakes.