Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Warped Composition

It looked great through the viewfinder, and a quick peek at the LCD before it flashed away, gave me the impression it came out just as good as it looked. The exposure was right on, it was centered, and in my hurry not to make anyone wait any longer for me, I only took the one shot.


brick building with front garden


During the processing of this image, I soon discovered its shortcomings. The biggest problem - the horizon was tilted just a bit. No problem, we can fix that - need to keep all those horizontal and vertical lines nice in straight with an image of this kind.

Well, straightening the lines means cropping afterwards to get the picture square again. Yikes - upon doing that, I lost the top of the roof! And the lens distortion for this wide angle shot was even more pronounced now that I had closed in on the building.

Since I only took the one shot, this was the best I could do for this image. I have been concentrating lately on exposure compensation and bracketing, but upon viewing an image like this, it reminds me to also consider the composition, and take an extra one or two shots for it as well.





7 comments:

  1. during my last trip/photoshoot I took some pictures, but like you , I took only one. they looked fine...until I got them home. Learned my lesson too. It was 400 miles back to the area I was shooting.

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  2. Kathy, I have the same problem sometimes too. I take my photos home and my horizontals are not horizontals. Thanks to Photoshop I can fix that, but then I do to loose parts of the image. I am starting to develop some good habits lately, because I rather get it right first time. Very nice shot, so symmetrical. Anna :)

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  3. You give a great lesson here in photo editing and the problems one can encounter.

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  4. Interesting image. It looks like it's going to wrap around on the other side.

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  5. Still a nice pic like the flowers, excuse me for my ignorance, but what is the building?

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  6. Bob,
    the building is one of many that is owned by a private school. The whole place looked like this - all I could think is that it must cost a mint to go there.

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  7. I am not into fine detail or a perfect photo but I had my share of not taking photos. I seem to not find it worthwhile until I think about it afterwards. The worst was visiting a small town here in South Africa, mainly for the snow (rare over here) and then I did not take a single photo of the town. 700+ km round trip. I "just forgot".
    Be that what I like your photos.

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