Shooting buildings

Shooting architecture with a wideangle lens, especially if you’re very close, can make it look like the building is leaning away. Because the vertical sides of the building become further away from the camera as the it gets taller, they converge together.

While the best way around this is to shoot from further back (see page 20), this isn’t always possible. One way around this is to shoot even wider than you need to, by a factor of 10-20 per cent. Then open the image in editing software, such as Photoshop, and use the Transform tool to stretch the top edges of the photo outwards, cropping the shot so that the verticals look vertical. You will lose a lot of detail at the edge of the image this way, hence shooting wider than needed to fit the building into the original shot.