Control of vertical perspective in architectural photography is in essence making the sides of buildings appear vertical. This will closely align your photographs to how your eyes see buildings.

How often have you seen buildings photographed where the sides appear to meet in the sky above the building? Have you wondered why buildings photograph like this? When in real life you only notice this effect by getting close to a tall building.

In this post I explain with the aid of images how this perspective affects architectural photographs and to manage it.

Vertical Perspective

Vertical perspective is when paralell lines converge at an imaginary point above or below the subject. This point is known as the vanishing point. Your eyes and brains are the lens and processor of the human visual system. Your brain processes and adjusts what your eyes see in real time so you don’t usually notice vertical perspective. Camera processors are much less powerful than your brain. Leaving you to either: accept vertical perspective, correct with camera technique or attempt rectification afterwards.

I prefer to correct vertical perspective in camera using a lens shift movement. This won’t work if you can’t position your camera far enough from the subject. In this case, you can make an artistic decision, to either embrace vertical perspective, crop your image or rectify later.

I’ve found computer software works well with small amounts of perspective correction. Larger rectification is more challenging and the results less satisfactory.

Causation

If your camera is plumb and level, your photograph will have no vertical perspective. If you photograph a building like this with a conventional lens you could lose the top of the building and get too much foreground. By tilting the camera upwards to lose foreground and include the top of the building you’ll induce vertical perspective.

Optical Solution

To make this solution work, you will need some specialist equipment, tripod, shift lens and spirit level. Place your camera on a tripod, use a spirit level make it plumb and level then use lens movements to control perspective This is achieved either by camera movements or lens shift depending on your equipment. Most architectural photographers I know use large format shift cameras and the others, tilt and shift lenses on DSLR cameras. Most large format cameras are supplied with fixed spirit levels, inexpensive hot shoe mounted spirit levels are available for other types of camera. Shift lenses aren’t available for all cameras so if you’re considering architectural photography check this when purchasing your camera.

Other movements on large format cameras are: horizontal shift, swing and tilt. Swing and tilt movements control depth of field, this allows you to select areas in your photograph to be blurred or sharp. You can combine horizontal shift and swing to control horizontal perspective when the view of your subject is obstructed. Tilt and shift lenses for DSLR cameras allow you to make similar but less extreme optical movements. You can also use horizontal shift to make images to stitch into a panorama.

Tilt and swing movements are more complicated and for a future post.

By Stuart Brown

One challenge facing architectural photographers is to create images that reflect how the human visual system views architecture. They say the camera never lies but it’s quite well known the camera doesn’t see how the human eye does. This is where the photographer’s understanding of perspective and lens angles is called upon.

The camera’s visual system has similarities with the human visual system, the lens it’s eyes and the processor it’s brain. Since no processor has the abilities of the human brain, the photographer its most important element. The famous twentieth century landscape photographer Ansel Adams said’ “’The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it”. That thought is as true and relevant today with digital technology as it was when Adams said it.

The success of an architectural photograph largely depends on how the photographer manages: perspective, illumination, colour balance, focus and composition. In this essay I will focus mainly on horizontal perspective, vertical perspectives will be covered in a future article.

Perspective

As the title suggests, this post will focus on how to control perspective in architectural interior photography. The concept of perspective is distant objects appear smaller than similar objects close up. In architectural photography, this typically manifests itself as converging lines. A common example is, looking along a straight railway track, the rails appear to converge at a distant vanishing point.

To the human eye the rails will always converge at the same point, the photographer has the ability to manipulate the vanishing point by altering the focal length of the lens. The shorter the focal length (or the wider the lens angle) the closer the vanishing point. Using a “standard” focal length lens which mimics the perspective of the human eye will often exclude too much of the architecture being photographed, this is where the twelve inches behind the camera comes in.

An understanding of how architects draw and sketch interiors using one-point and two-point perspectives is a good starting point for the photographer. The architect will always have the advantage of being able to exclude walls and other obstructions that the photographer can’t remove. Thus the photographer is left to make compromises in focal length and take advantage of specialist camera movements to create realistic looking photographs that convey how the human visual system perceives interior spaces.

One-Point and Two-Point Perspective

The railway line example used earlier is an example of a single vanishing point perspective, usually referred to in architecture as a one-point. One points are often used to portray long rectangular interior spaces, the camera is placed precisely on the centreline of the space and perpendicular to the end wall. This is a time consuming image to set up, as accurate camera positioning is critical.

The two-point is created with the camera pointed at a corner of the room. Ceiling height at the corner appears lower than elsewhere as it’s the furthest point from the camera giving separate vanishing points for the walls on either side. This technique is often used in smaller rooms and can make the space appear larger than reality.

The use of a long focal length lens in either perspective will usually create a large and dominant end wall in the composition with a little of the side walls. Switching to a wide angle lens can make the end wall appear small and make the floor and ceiling appear to slope. The technique to mimic the human eye is to refrain from using the widest angle lens and stitch multiple images together using the longest lens with sufficient coverage. To do this without distortion, either a specialist tilt and shift lens or large format camera with optical movements can be used.