I have been recently asked whether I could shoot some historic buildings in Buffalo, NY. As a result, I have spent some time with the Buffalo Architecture: A Guide book and looked for some new ideas. I've picked a few locations and headed downtown about half an hour after sunrise. It turned out that I should have consulted The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE) for the sun position to know that at this time of the year, the sun was still too far north that early and my subjects would still be in a deep shadow. Since I chose not to, my primary location was not well lit. I will need to go back at a later time, or later in the season, when the sun is shining from the East (that brings another problem of rather flat lighting that obliterates textures but amidst high rise buildings one can't have it all). So I headed to my backup location, the Dun Building, that has stayed out of my collection so far.

Even here, the sun was hitting only the top and would take too long to move to the east, however, as it would rise it would illuminate more and more of the building. And I liked the partial highlight giving the building a different character compared to full front lighting. I walked in the area for about half an hour and the sun worked its way couple floors down, lighting up the top three floors now. I was ready to give it a shot.

Niagara Square Falling Backwards So now for the problem definition. When you photograph a tall building and simply point your camera up to fit the building in, it appears to fall backwards in photos. I did not take that version as a starting point this morning so I am including a different photo where my camera was tilted up. You can clearly see both the Court Building on the left and City Hall on the right distorted, narrowing towards the top.

That was not the look I wanted. I wanted to make it look like the building was photographed head on. What choices does one have? I am sure I will forget some but here are several that come to mind: a view camera with its shift movement or a tilt / shift lens for my DSLR (Nikon 24mm PC-E, Canon 24mm TS-E). I do not have either. Next, I could keep my camera parallel to the face of the building insuring a distortion free photo and backing up until the whole building fit in. While that works it has drawbacks. One ends up with a lot of dead foreground and cropping throws out about half of the resolution. With a wide angle lens, it may not be necessary ro back up too much but then wide angle lens distortion might be introduced. You may not always be able to back up much either. And while I could here as you back up things start getting in the way - poles, wires, parking lot booths, and more.

Dun Building on Buffalo's Pearl Street

Then there are some software solutions. You can point the camera upwards and take your skewed photo and later use software like PTLens to correct it. This is a single photo solution but requires caution. Less distortion is easier to correct and you will need some space around the building as you will lose it during the shifting process. I have had a mixed experience with this and will continue to try to get better at predicting what the software will need.

This morning, I went for another software solution, which is normally used for panorama stitching, only this time my panorama would be tall, not wide. I have been using PTGui for several years and have been very happy with it. I pointed the camera straight ahead at the building (holding the camera for a horizontal photo) and zoomed in to fill the width of the frame with the  building leaving some small margins for errors and to provide breathing room. Tis would be my anchor frame - one of the PTGUI features allows you to select one of the frames as an anchor that drives the perspective. Then, I tilted the camera up a little, overlapping more than for a normal panorama, about 50% of the frame. I repeated that for the whole height of the building.

Five frames was what I needed to get the whole building in. Later at the computer I loaded the JPGs into PTGUI and let it do its magic. I had to pick the perspective rendering that yielded what I liked the most, tweak the anchor image position a little since some leaning was still present, and correct a little rotation since my anchor image was not perfectly level. Overall, just a few minutes of manual work.

After PTGUI, I cropped to what you see on the left. The nice side effect of this method is that it does not reduce your final resolution but boosts it. The file I have to work with is 10609 x 3972 (42 megapixels) and I did not even select the maximum output size out of PTGUI.

Some drawbacks here? Shooting from very close, just across the street, provides a different perspective then stepping back would. This is the most pronounced here with the roof overhang, which seems negligible from distance yet here, looking at it from underneath, it is rather pronounced. I guess I have just found my next project - going back and doing the straight shot from distance for comparison.

Have fun working your perspective!

Equipment used:

• Nikon D600
• Nikon 24-85mm Nikkor Lens
• Handheld, no tripod, no filters
• Think Tank Speed Demon Waist Pack, Petzl Zipka Plus 2 Headlamp (always in the bag just in case), SanDisk Extreme 32GB SD Cards
• PTGUI, GIMP, Nikon Capture NX2

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