Perspective, viewable?

[Darryl Roberts]

Hi,

I'm a newbie. I know a great advantage of the LF camera is to alter perspective. Should I be able to see this on the ground-glass, or is it only seen on the prints?

Thank you.

[Harry v. Loon]

The negative replaces the ground glass.
So what you see is what you get.

Harry

[Darryl Roberts]

I really appreciate the answer, again, thank you.

[Brian Ellis]

A view camera will allow you to do quite a few things but altering perspective isn't one of them. The only way to alter perspective is to move the camera.

[Darryl Roberts]

"The best rule of thumb is to use the swings and tilts on the film plane to alter perspective...." Steve Simmons in Using The View Camera.

Brian, have I misunderstood your point?

[Richard K.]

And, at the risk of putting my foot in it (again), you can't change perspective by simply changing lenses to a different focal length. Perspective would be the same for a 90mm as for a 210 mm lens (different framing and image size of course) if you don't change position. I think that SS meant that tilting or swinging the back will change the shape (goemetry) of the objects but not their relative positionings (perspective). Front swings and tilts will not affect geometry just the plane of focus. Brian is right, to change perspective you needs to move!

[domenico Foschi]

But you do change position when you move the standards of the camera.
So at the end, yes, you do change perspective.

[Darryl Roberts]

For clarity, btw I would try this now but it's too hot outside. I will be able to make a building, that with my 35mm looks slanted and the sides look as if they'll merge, straight (looking that is)?

[domenico Foschi]

And to answer to Darryl, yes you can see the changes.
Seeing what exactly will come out in the negative means to be able to see the ground glass when the lens is stopped down, if you stop it down.

[Darryl Roberts]

That's the rationale I was seeking, thank you domenico, and everyone else for the input.

[Daniel_Buck]

A view camera will allow you to do quite a few things but altering perspective isn't one of them. The only way to alter perspective is to move the camera.
everytime someone brings up "altering perspective" this reply is given. To most peoples way of thinking, being able to shift lines around and stretch the image with the rear standard equates to "altering perspective". I don't know if it's technically 'altering' the perspective, but it's close enough I think to call it that. :) You can technically 'see around objects' just a bit by shifting/rising the front standard, but I think what most people mean by 'perspective' is correcting for converging lines, and making foreground 'loom'.

[Alan Davenport]

Yup, photographers beat MickeySoft by a hundred years: the groundglass is the original WYSIWYG interface...

[domenico Foschi]

everytime someone brings up "altering perspective" this reply is given. To most peoples way of thinking, being able to shift lines around and stretch the image with the rear standard equates to "altering perspective". I don't know if it's technically 'altering' the perspective, but it's close enough I think to call it that. :) You can technically 'see around objects' just a bit by shifting/rising the front standard, but I think what most people mean by 'perspective' is correcting for converging lines, and making foreground 'loom'.

It is altering perspective because in fact the camera gets moved, at least part of it.
Perspective is given by a definite point of view.
If you change the point of view either by moving in any direction the front or rear standard, perspective changes.

[Daniel_Buck]

It is altering perspective because in fact the camera gets moved, at least part of it.
Perspective is given by a definite point of view.
If you change the point of view either by moving in any direction the front or rear standard, perspective changes.
I agree :)

[Leonard Evens]

It is not unusual to get different contradictory answers to a question in this forum, but the problem is exacerbated when discussing "perspective" because people mean entirely different things by that term.

The technical meaning of perspective relates to which points in the subject are in line with each other and with the center of perspective or point of view, which we may take for all practical purposes to be the lens. Thus, if a tree is blocking part of a building from where you place the camera lens, then there is nothing you can do with your view camera to change that except moving the position of the lens. That could be done either by moving the camera or just using a rise/fall or shift of the front standard, if the needed correction is not too great.

But there are also other common meanings of the term. For example, it might simply refer to what part of the scene is in the frame. You can change that by rise/fall or shift of the rear standard without changing the position of the lens.

Another meaning refers to the position of vanishing points. The images of any pair of parallel lines in the subject will have images on your ground glass which generally will intersect somewhere in the image plane, perhaps beyond the confines of the frame or even the camera. That point is called the vanishing point, and the image lines will appear to converge to it. The only circumstance in which that won't happen will be if the rear standard is also parallel to the pair of lines. (In that case, the vanishing point is considered to be at infinity.) This situation is commonly met in photography where, for example, you have to point the camera up to include the top of the building in the frame. As a result, the images of the vertical parallel sides of the building converge to a vanishing point somewhere in the sky. With a conventional camera, there is nothing you can do about it, but with a view camera, all you have to do is to adjust the rear standard so that it is parallel to the building. There are a couple of ways to do this, which are described in a book like Steve Simmons's Using the View Camera.

The remaining meaning of perspective deals with the fact that in principle, your eye must have the same relation to the final print that the lens did to the scene. This will be the case usually if you use a "normal" focal length for the format. If you use a short or long focal length instead, then there will be "perspective distortions" because your eye is at the wrong distance from the print. That is something of a misnomer, but it refers to something real, and knowing how to use focal length productively to attain one's aesthetic ends is part of what photography is about.

[Clay Turtle]

The remaining meaning of perspective deals with the fact that in principle, your eye must have the same relation to the final print that the lens did to the scene. This will be the case usually if you use a "normal" focal length for the format. If you use a short or long focal length instead, then there will be "perspective distortions" because your eye is at the wrong distance from the print. That is something of a misnomer, but it refers to something real, and knowing how to use focal length productively to attain one's aesthetic ends is part of what photography is about. Ya, I was wondering if I had misheard or misunderstood when people make the comment about normal lens as being the normal (natural) perspective that we see with our eyes.

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

So what you see is what you get...

At least when you see what you are doing ;)
When stopped down to f/32, a view camera image is very dim.
And a small image of size 6x7 (with rollfilm use) cannot be viewed easily without some viewing accessories :loupe, binocular viewer, etc....
the larger the gournd glass the easier you can see how perspective is rendered.
But what you (eventually ...) see is actually what get, agreed ;)

[Brian Ellis]

everytime someone brings up "altering perspective" this reply is given. To most peoples way of thinking, being able to shift lines around and stretch the image with the rear standard equates to "altering perspective". I don't know if it's technically 'altering' the perspective, but it's close enough I think to call it that. :) You can technically 'see around objects' just a bit by shifting/rising the front standard, but I think what most people mean by 'perspective' is correcting for converging lines, and making foreground 'loom'.

I do always give this reply but I don't do it in order to be a wise ass. The OP said he was new to LF photography. I think it's important for someone new to LF photograpy to use correct terminology and to understand what camera movements are actually doing and what they aren't doing. They aren't changing perspective. Shift changes the portion of the scene that's included in the photograph, there's no change in perspective. Swings and tilts change the plane of focus and/or the shape of objects. They don't change perspective. Some people obviously think they do and if they want to continue in that belief it's fine with me. But at least the OP will have the opportunity to think a little about what changing perspective really means and what camera movements actually do, which is all I was trying to accomplish.

[Brian Ellis]

"The best rule of thumb is to use the swings and tilts on the film plane to alter perspective...." Steve Simmons in Using The View Camera.

Brian, have I misunderstood your point?

"True perspective depends only upon the camera-to-subject distance." Ansel Adams, "The Camera."

With all due respect to both, you take Steve, I'll take Ansel. :-)

[Gordon Moat]

When I first learned about perspective, it related to usage in drawing. In that realm, perspective is the relationship of foreground to background, and has nothing to do with distance. If you consider a view camera as drawing a scene, then moving the standards does alter perspective (drawing definition) because you are changing the relationship of foreground and background. This becomes more obvious when several objects are in a scene, when the relationship between objects is changed.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat Photography (http://www.gordonmoat.com)

[domenico Foschi]

"True perspective depends only upon the camera-to-subject distance." Ansel Adams, "The Camera."

With all due respect to both, you take Steve, I'll take Ansel. :-)

I will do the unthinkable and unforgivable by speaking my own mind and disagreeing with Ansel Adams by replacing the word distance with the word position.

Also, I would like to know what is intended by "true perspective'.
Is it the faithful rendition of parallel lines?

[Richard K.]

"True perspective depends only upon the camera-to-subject position."

Domenico, not to be argumentative or anything, but what does that above now mean? It seems to me to make sense only if position means distance. What did you intend it to mean? To me perspective (or AA's true perspective) refers to the relative positioning of objects in the field of view. Object A is to the left of telephone pole B which itself is in front and to the right of the garbage can, C. Those relative postionings (perspective) can not be changed other by moving the camera. Perhaps this use of the word perspective is being confused with the idea of formal perspective such as in a painting where perspective (and vanishing point(s)) is what can be altered by how converging lines are rendered. Perhaps a better term for this photographic perspective might be relative spatial configuration of the objects in the field of view, but who wants to say that?!? :)

[Alan Davenport]

Alas, many of us choose to equate the term "perspective" ONLY with the concept of the vanishing point and converging lines that we were taught in Art 101. There are other definitions for the word that apply equally well to photography...

[izo]

Ya, I was wondering if I had misheard or misunderstood when people make the comment about normal lens as being the normal (natural) perspective that we see with our eyes.

1. first of all, human vision is bifocal, not mono, like lense is. that's why we get sense for depth, 3d perception etc. shape of human field of view is kind of elipse (two circles combined and overlaping in the middle), and some areas substracted by our face features, like nose etc. our fov basicaly have shape something like ski or pilot glasses, if u can imagine that.
http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/personnel/al/papers/64vision/17_files/image026.jpg
http://www.healthline.com/galeimage?contentId=genh_05_00877&id=genh_05_img0450

2. human fov is something like 160 degrees on horizontal axis and, i dont know, maybe 70-90 on the vertical. now, we see sharp and 3d only in the center of our fov, and that's is close to normal lense (50mm in leica format, but 40mm would be more correct). again, our fov si much wider, but we only see sharp in that range.
http://vision.arc.nasa.gov/personnel/al/papers/64vision/17.htm

3. i don't think perspective is the best word to use in photography/optics, since fov covers everything. u get big fov with wide lense and less with narrow (tele) one. there is some distorsion if tilt/shift is used, when u get elipse/egg (not with shift) shape and not circular image on the flat surface, which can straight lines or gain/reduce dof, but that's about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_camera#View_camera_movements
if i said somethnig stupid, feel free to correct me..

[SAShruby]

Izo,

You got a little bit too technical. IMO, I would say that any camera movement would change perspective on you GG. Objects in space around us are independent from perspective, it is a series of distances between two points of objects in that space.

The view of the camera creates certain perspective of the space. Essentially you try to transform 3D space to 2D space and at the same time optically preserve the perspective of the 3D space.

[Mark Sawyer]

Even confined to the art world, "perspective" has several meanings. For example, there's "atmospheric perspective", where atmospheric haze is used to indicate distance. If you want to use that definition, you could quite correctly start calling your UV and polarizing filters "perspective filters".

However, in the large format world, "perspective" has traditionally been used to refer to the one-point/two-point/three-point perspective a lot of us learned anywhere from art class to drafting class, (where I first went through it in high school). Using the camera movements, you can control one- two- or three-point perspective. And yup, that perspective control is viewable on the ground glass. That's why there are grids on many ground glasses, to help see whether tilted or converging lines have been made parallel to the edges of the frame.

You can use alternate definitions of the word, even talking about the "political perspective" of a photograph, but with view cameras, we're generally talking swings and tilts for perspective controls. This is why manufacturers use the term "perspective control lenses" for lenses that simulate the swings and tilts of a view camera.

BTW, from Ansel Adams "The Camera":

"Figure 10:3. Perspective. The concept of vanishing points, used by artists when drawing in perspective, applies to photographs as well. In the case of a building photographed from an angle, the parallel horizontal lines of both sides of the building converge at two vanishing points. If the swing back adjustment is used to keep the camera back parallel to one of the building surfaces, the parallel lines of that side will be parallel in the photograph."

[izo]

Izo,

You got a little bit too technical. IMO, I would say that any camera movement would change perspective on you GG. Objects in space around us are independent from perspective, it is a series of distances between two points of objects in that space.

The view of the camera creates certain perspective of the space. Essentially you try to transform 3D space to 2D space and at the same time optically preserve the perspective of the 3D space.

i know, i was little off topic, but i was trying to explain that word perspective (as re-invention in 15th.c.) is more adressed to our visual perception of 3d space, not camera's, (which is techical ;) ) and which not using same fov like we do.
but ok, i alse agree that word perspective correction is not wrong, since with shifting u're changing horizon and with that also "perspective" of image projected on the film plane. hmm, now i'm in contradiction to myself, i must go to sleep..:o