Out of plumb buildings full frame vs crop: When taking photos of buildings with a crop sensor the buildings Are not plumb/vertical, Is this condition less with a full frame camera. And...

dyximan

When taking photos of buildings with a crop sensor the buildings Are not plumb/vertical, Is this condition less with a full frame camera. And other than post processing and/or a tilt shift lens, Is there any other way or technique to get buildings trees etc to be plumb/vertical sooc.

RichardTaylor Loc: Sydney, Australia

Keep the camera parallel to the building or trees. The only difference a full frame camera may make is that you may have wider lenses available which may help you full the frame with the subjects. Another alternative may be to do a vertical panorama.

dyximan

With a single tree or building that make sense but I'm talking abought for example if you stood in the middle of the street and you had buildings on both sides they would lean in. If you got one plum the other would be way out and vice versa. And thank you for your response. I should have been more specific in my initial post.

twosummers Loc: Melbourne Australia or Lincolnshire England

Most digital cameras have grid that you can superimpose on the viewfinder/liveview. Line up your verticals with the grid. Also keep the cameral completely level from a horizon perspective, again some cameras have a level too. Often tripods have built in spirit levels. If you can get things level this way it saves time sorting in out later in post processing where you will lose some of your view in so doing.

weberwest Loc: Ferndale WA

These perspective distortions are fully natural and occur both in crop or full frame cameras. To a good extent, they can be corrected, or at least ameliorated in post processing.

If you use Lightroom, use the "Vertical" Transform button, generally moving the slider into negative territory, together with the horizontal and the rotational sliders to correct this effect. This will normally "stretch" the buildings, making them narrower, which you can correct to a good extend with moving the "Aspect" slider also into negative territory.

I am just working on a series of thousands of pictures from a trip to Northern Europe, where 90% of the pictures are of buildings and just about all of them need correction. It is a LOT of work, but can be done. In Lightroom, there is now also a new feature that lets you do an Auto-Correct, which sometimes works out quite well and with much less hassle, but it is not fool-proof: finally you are in the driver seat to decide how much correction you will want to apply.

Good luck.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

dyximan wrote:

When taking photos of buildings with a crop sensor the buildings Are not plumb/vertical, Is this condition less with a full frame camera. And other than post processing and/or a tilt shift lens, Is there any other way or technique to get buildings trees etc to be plumb/vertical sooc.

Yes, other than correcting in post processing or a tilt shift lens you can resolve some issues with perspective distortion with a very very tall ladder so you are positioned at around the midpoint of the height of the building.

dyximan

Thank you yes I've used the auto correct and the manual correct in Lightroom, But what I was trying to figure out is 1, is there a difference in that perspective between a full frame camera and a cop sensor, And or if a tilt shift is basically the only thing you can use to do it (IN) camera.

dyximan

Mwsilvers, I work near the salesforce tower based on its current height do you know where I can buy a 535' tall step ladder lol just kidding I know what you mean.
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JD750 Loc: SoCal

dyximan wrote:

When taking photos of buildings with a crop sensor the buildings Are not plumb/vertical, Is this condition less with a full frame camera. And other than post processing and/or a tilt shift lens, Is there any other way or technique to get buildings trees etc to be plumb/vertical sooc.

It sounds like you are talking about perspective convergence, or Keystone distortion. This happens when the image plane of the camera is not parallel to the vertical lines of the buildings. I.e., the camera was tilted up to capture the top of the buildings. To avoid it you must keep the camera image plane parallel to the vertical lines of the buildings. If you are standing on the ground close to the building you will need a wide lens to do this while capturing the tops of the buildings. Another option is to stand farther away. Or move up vertically so you are closer to the middle of the building.

A wider field of view helps so in that respect the larger sensor is going to help. It will give you a wider field of view for a given focal length lens. The tilt-shift lens is another solution and if you are serious about this specialty, you might want to consider buying one.

The link below is to a good article on the subject and what can be done to avoid it:
https://digital-photography-school.com/why-are-my-buildings-falling-over-a-short-guide-to-perspective-distortion-and-correction-in-photography/

LWW Loc: Banana Republic of America

mwsilvers wrote:

Yes, other than correcting in post processing or a tilt shift lens you can resolve some issues with perspective distortion with a very very tall ladder so you are positioned at around the midpoint of the height of the building.

Yes, being dead center side to side and up/down is the easiest in camera solution.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

dyximan wrote:

.....is there a difference in that perspective between a full frame camera and a cop sensor....

The only things that affect perspective are position and line of sight. If the line of sight is tilted above horizontal you'll get convergence towards the top. If the line of sight is tilted below horizontal you'll get convergence towards the bottom (and divergence towards the top).

One possible problem with wide angle lenses is that you may have a tendency to tilt them up the way because if you don't you can end up with large amounts of featureless foreground (e.g. bare tarmac, featureless ground/grass etc) if you keep the camera properly horizontal. One possible answer is to be aware of that tendency, shoot horizontal anyway and just crop off much of the bottom half of your shots. But you'll find it's very counter-intuitive to shoot like that, plus you lose resolution when you do a lot of cropping.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

dyximan wrote:

When taking photos of buildings with a crop sensor the buildings Are not plumb/vertical, Is this condition less with a full frame camera. And other than post processing and/or a tilt shift lens, Is there any other way or technique to get buildings trees etc to be plumb/vertical sooc.

As JD750 said, this is keystone distortion, and it doesn't matter if you are using a cellphone camera or an 8x10 view camera. If you tilt the camera up the verticals will converge towards that vanishing point in the sky.

Keep the camera level and square to what you are shooting. In addition to the vertical perspective issue, horizontals will also converge in the same way if your camera is not square with the plane of the building.

A lens with a shift feature, shooting from a higher vantage point or post processing are the only alternatives if you don't want to buy a shift lens. The post processing alternative almost always has a corresponding loss of image and loss of image quality.

However, if you have a wide enough lens you can sometimes just keep the camera level and crop out the foreground, leaving you without the keystone distortion you get when you tilt the camera up. You will still lose lots of image, so you will need to compose your shot with that in mind.

RichardTaylor Loc: Sydney, Australia

dyximan wrote:

With a single tree or building that make sense but I'm talking abought for example if you stood in the middle of the street and you had buildings on both sides they would lean in. If you got one plum the other would be way out and vice versa. And thank you for your response. I should have been more specific in my initial post.

Why not use as helicoptor, or a drone, to achieve the correct viewpoint(s)?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Beauty surrounds us, but we need full-frame cameras to capture it.

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

You can correct this problem in Lightroom and such, but some shots with the buildings leaning in are quite attractive.