Fix Falling Houses And Tilting Trees - Perspective Correction (Getting PC) - No View Camera Required - Quick Perspective Fixes With Ordinary Lenses - Visualize And Get The Camera View To Match - Correct Horizontal And Vertical Perspective At The Same Time - Sometimes Film Makes More Sense

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Cathedral Range above Tenaya Lake
Yosemite National Park

California's eastern Sierra Nevada range pokes up jagged summits you see long before you reach them. They're beautiful year-round, but there's a catch outside summer months. Northern California's most direct route to those gorgeous mountains closes in late October, and doesn't reopen again until at least May, sometimes as late as July 4. You can get there in winter by driving north and through a pass that's usually open year-round. But it takes an extra two hours or so.

I'd missed yellow-headed blackbirds courting and squawking near Mono Lake's DeChambeau Ponds last spring, since the Tioga Pass Road, that direct route to the mountains, didn't open until almost July after another heavy snow year. By September, rodents are filling their cheeks to get fat for winter, and the last tourists make their way to Bodie ghost town. I managed a long weekend in the eastern Sierras before snow closed things down again.

I'm used to 'Oh, wow!' moments, but they're usually in my rear-view mirror as I'm leaving New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. This time, I saw several young Yosemite employees looking west, and screeched to a halt in the parking lot at the Tuolumne Meadows store. The mountains get you above urban pollution, and give you very clear sunset light. The workers had been staring at a sunset so brilliant it looked as if God Himself would walk out of it:

Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park

I had to check in before eight, so I reluctantly sailed past lobster taquitos calling me from the Whoa Nellie Deli, and drove into the little town of Lee Vining. If you're in a hurry too, you can catch a palatable dinner in town at Bodie Mike's - that's what I did.

The next day I bumped over the dirt road to Bodie. This is one of the largest preserved ghost towns in the American west. Over $100 million in gold came out of the Bodie Hills in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Perspective Correction
You may try a wide angle lens to 'get it all in' horizontally. But buildings and tall trees force you to point the camera up for a vertical shot. With horizontals and a wide angle lens used close, you still may have to tilt the camera. This makes the subject look like it's about to fall over:

James Stuart Cain House, Bodie, California

Get The Natural Look
There's at least one and sometimes two solutions. The first one is relatively inexpensive in money and learning time, and that's to use a longer focal length from a farther distance so you keep camera tilting to a minimum:

Wheelbarrow and D.V. Cain House
Bodie, California

Sometimes I see great light on a compelling subject, and can't find a place to stand to capture the image. That happens a lot with the tilting subject problem - there's no place to stand for the image you visualize.

Ansel Adams popularized the second solution to this problem. You can change the way your lens projects light on film by sliding it - no tilting required. Adams used a view camera and kept his film parallel to the subject, shifting the lens on its bellows to change the image without distorting its perspective. The lens he used projected an image circle much larger than the film plate. By shifting the lens, he projected a different part of that circle on the film. He was able to keep parallel lines parallel, buildings from 'falling over', and he even shifted his reflection out of windows he stood in front of to get the architectural images he wanted.

View cameras are heavy and fairly expensive, not just in their initial cost but in time to use and process sheet film. You load, expose, and finally develop just one image at a time.

No View Camera Required
There's a modern alternative. For many years, small-format camera makers like Canon, Nikon and Olympus have produced perspective-control lenses for their cameras. Nikon's are PC lenses. Canon designates theirs TS or TS-E. Canon's 24mm f/3.5L TS-E is a good example. A conventional 24mm lens covers around 84 degrees when it projects onto a piece of 35mm film. The 24mm TS-E sees 100 degrees, but you can only use 84 degrees of that at a time.

You choose the part of the coverage you want by physically rotating the lens and sliding it. The combination lets you choose shifts at any arbitrary orientation. Simple horizontal or vertical shifts will get the most use.

In prior trips, I'd chosen views to minimize perspective distortion of Bodie's old buildings. With conventional lenses, you can come close to maintaining those verticals. But I always ended up with some windows or doors that didn't look right.

This time, I had the 24mm TS-E along just to correct the problem. If you're used to autofocus, you'll need to remember to turn a focusing ring. The shift construction makes autofocus operation impossible for these lenses.

Quick Perspective Fixes With Ordinary Lenses
Before you decide there's no way you can afford another lens, understand that there are ways to minimize perspective problems. The cardinal rule is to avoid tilting the camera.

Some tilted perspectives look stranger than others. Verticals are the worst offenders. If you can't photograph a skyscraper from the 41st floor of the one across the street, photograph a piece of it that suggests the rest of the building. I do a lot of this with trees. Show a leaf or thick trunk, and viewers will see the rest in their mind while they appreciate the part in the image.

Slight tilting verticals that are almost right usually look worse than extremes. Shooting almost straight up at a coast redwood with the sun backlighting the branches looks OK:

Coast redwoods
Big Basin Redwoods State Park

A building 'falling over' or a tilted doorway won't look right. Sometimes, you can get a vertically-correct photograph of a single-story if you capture the image at a mild angle from one side. This creates a more pleasing horizontal 'converging point'. It also avoids the straight-on 'mug shot' view that's usually pretty boring.

The Best Solution
But the best solution for many of these images is the perspective-control lens.

Your two eyes and brain compensate for the distortion you see. But the camera sees with one 'eye', and has no 'brain' to make perspective corrections. Before digital, if you burned through enough Kodachrome, you figured out how the camera saw the scene in front of it. With digital photography, all you need is the time to take pictures and figure it out. That experience lets you visualize your scene before you take the picture. It's really not enough to 'snap and pray'. You're better off getting it right in the camera to begin with - it saves time later.

Visualize And Get The Camera View To Match
I visualized the image I wanted of mine owner James Stuart Cain's house first. Then I set the tripod to the level I needed to capture that view. I set the camera to manual exposure and metered without shifting the lens. Perspective-control lenses fool the camera's built-in meter and give gross overexposure when they're shifted. Most SLR metering systems aren't accurate with light coming in at an extreme angle from an-off-center lens, so you need to meter unshifted first.

I remembered to focus, and shifted the lens to get the image I'd visualized first. I checked focus again to be sure everything important was sharp. No tilting verticals or horizontals? Sharp details? Good - take the picture! All of this takes much less time to actually do.

I found the old Dodge pickup parked in front of the dilapidated gas station. There were several vertical lines in the pickup and the Wheaton-Hollis Hotel in the background. A simple lens shift let me capture all those lines without distortion:

Dodge Pickup, Wheaton-Hollis Hotel,
Bodie, California

Later, at the end of the day, I walked into the Tom Miller house, one of the only structures you can actually enter in Bodie. Dust is about a quarter inch thick in the old kitchen, and springs and stuffing sprout from an old couch.

But the most striking view came looking out the front door. An old oil by western painter Ace Powell shows a similar doorway looking out on another deserted town. The painting's been in my family for years, and the similarity between it and what I was looking at stopped me in my tracks:

Front Doorway, Tom Miller House
Bodie, California

The doorway and the view it frames show many verticals. They also point to one of the problems in old architecture - sometimes buildings shift, warping walls and doorways. So I aligned the verticals for the most pleasing image.

Correct Horizontal And Vertical Perspective At The Same Time
TS-E and PC lenses let you correct in vertical and horizontal directions simultaneously, by allowing both rotation and shifting. It may not be possible to completely correct all the problems, or you may not see all of them. There's some horizontal distortion in the doorway image. But the vertical distortion was more noticeable to me, so I fixed it.

Sequoia Gigantea, Tuolumne Grove
Yosemite National Park

Sometimes Film Makes More Sense
When I bought the 24mm TS-E lens, I wanted its full 84 degree angle of view from film or a 35mm-sized sensor. But I'm not made of money. Canon's EOS 5D is a full-frame digital SLR with 12.4MP resolution. All the published images I've seen from it are stunning. It also runs $2800 or so.

Canon EOS and other makers' film SLRs have gotten really cheap. Online equipment dealer KEH advertised an EOS Elan 7E in bargain condition for $133. I bought it. The money I saved will buy a lot of film.

The place where digital really shines is at high ISO with large sensors. Film is still grain-free at ISO 100, though it usually starts to look terrible compared to digital by ISO 400. So I use Kodak UC 100 in good light for film images, and use fast shutter speeds or a tripod when I remember to bring one.

But sometimes, the client needs high quality pictures in a place where an SLR's slapping mirror would be too loud. Flash won't be an option either - it's too distracting. That's when I use rangefinder Leica cameras, with a 50mm f/1 Noctilux or 35mm f/2 Summicron-ASPH. My film of choice in dim venues is Fuji's NPZ, an ISO 800 negative film. Its color is quite good, and grain is reasonable for enlargements to 8 by 10.

The digital-or-film choice comes down to one question: what do you need to get the picture? If you know how to use the equipment you have to photograph in the woods, or an interior for an open house, use it. A California gull's comfort zone will tell you how big a telephoto you'll need. If the venue requires absolute quiet and available light without flash, that makes your decision too. You or your client will decide if the pictures are good enough. When you deliver the final prints, you're the only one who'll know if the image was scanned, or it was pixels to begin with.

California Gull, Mono Lake South Tufa

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