Correcting perspective with Transformations
When shooting in cities, most photographers take pictures of architecture, grand old buildings, historical monuments, and even architecturally relevant new stuff. Architecture is a great subject, but because most of us photograph from ground level (and therefore point the camera upward), our pictures often suffer from optical distortion. By packing more information into a small frame using a wide-angle lens, the optical system cannot help but distort some of the vertical and horizontal lines. Shooting horizontally, from an upper floor opposite a tall building, means that you're likely to suffer less optical distortion because there's less reason to tilt the camera up to get everything into the frame. The following image shows one way around the problem of extreme optical distortion:
In the days before software applications such as Photoshop Elements, photographers had to spend upward of $3,000 to buy a...