CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Ashok Kandimalla - Ashok Kandimalla has been in the photographic field for over three decades and has extensive experience in both film and digital photography. Being an electronics engineer by profession and a photographer, he possesses a unique and deep insight into the technical aspects of digital photography and equipment. He has published more than a 100 articles on photography and some of his writings have also been published in the well-known international magazine Popular Photography. An avid collector of photographic books and vintage cameras, Ashok has a keen interest in the history of photography and a passion for sharing his knowledge on photography through teaching and writing. He is the only Indian photographer to be featured on the Nikon Centenary website. He is presently working as a Management and Engineering consutant. He can be reached at [e-mail].

- Ashok Kandimalla

As you know, the world around us is in three dimensions, that is, it exhibits depth. Photographs either printed (or paintings for that matter) or viewed on the screen are rendered “flat” in two dimensions without any depth. One of the techniques used by photographers (and painters) to show apparent depth in a twodimensional flat rendering is through “perspective” which is technically a projection. Due to perspective, objects close to the viewer look larger than those that are far away. This property is used to create the impression of depth in a photograph and is used extensively, for example, by landscape photographers. More of this shortly.

Perspective also manifests itself in other ways. One of the frequently encountered problems when photographing tall buildings or structures occurs because we tend to point the camera upwards, with a wide-angle lens to get the whole building in the frame. This causes the building to appear as if it is leaning backward (Picture 1) and is erroneously called distortion. However, it is not, and hence is not a defect! This is due to perspective. There are a few ways to solve this problem. Examples are choosing a proper shooting position, shifting the lens axis by using a suitable camera or lens, employing suitable post-processing techniques, etc. In both Lightroom and Photoshop, there are multiple tools available to achieve the needed correction, but the Perspective Warp function in the latter is unquestionably the most powerful. This article will explain to you how to use it.

Perspective Warp is in the Edit section of the main menu of Photoshop. You can invoke it by

Edit > Perspective Warp