use of physical camera on high rise buildings - to vertical shift or not?

[simonm]

Hi all

 

I have faced this dilemna several times and I am only a hobbysit in terms of my camera knowledge. When I see some works of high rise buildings, some of them have the vertical lines corrected and others not. When youre up close it looks way too weird to correct them - so I was just wondering what you believe is the right technique when trying to fit a large building in the camera view. Do you tend to vertically correct the lens or not?

 

Hope that makes sense.

[SgWRX]

i correct depending on the shot, but sometimes move the camera target to un-correct a bit. example a recent 8 story building from across the street at an intersection i did this because in real life being that close you would expect some convergence. in some situations being further away its not all that unpleasant to correct.

[Chris MacDonald]

I think you answered your own question; when you're close up it looks weird, so don't correct.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

False dichotomy. Your choice is not "correct or don't". It is how much correction. Don't even think of it as "correction". You could think of it as "distortion" but maybe better is "an angle parameter".

 

You can perfectly correct. Call it 100%.

One reply suggested full correction tweaked off just a bit. Say 95%.

Another might only tweak away from normal just a bit. Say 15%.

 

It depends on what you want. Different amounts of angle represent different ways of seeing, different ways of representing. An elevation represents what a building is. Except it leaves out a lot. Every 2d projection leaves out some valuable kind of information. A nice dramatic perspective shows what people actually (within the bounds of incorrect perspective projection) see so they are correct. But people don't see what their eyes record. If you stand near a building and take it in, you shift your center, your brain straightens lines and magnifies what is far away. If you stand near a building and take a photograph/rendering the distant stuff looks tiny.

 

Correction can help make the building look like it seems.

 

But if you're too close then full correction won't look like an elevation, it will look wrong. So maybe you tweak it to throw in a little, but not all, of the perspective to make it seem real..

 

Back in the day you weren't able to place a camera back a mile or twenty and take an elevation of a building, so they fixed the problem with cool cameras. If we want to render a perfect elevation of a mile tall building we can do it.

[elipan]

I don't believe there are some set of rules.

Just do whatever looks best and expresses the idea in the best way available.

[Corey Beaulieu]

What Peter said...

 

and you can now use Orthogonal camera settings to do elevations.

 

Also, I frequently use the shift offset on a 90 degree camera to get what I want. It too fails at a certain point, but it work well on a lot of shots.