Photography is a visual art. Just like in any form of art, technical knowledge, perfection and creativity are the three pillars to taste success in the field of photography. If it comes to technicalities, any efficient photographer knows well how to capture light as well as bend it toward the digital sensor. If you are an aspiring photographer, your in-depth understanding of how the bending produces an effect on the images is a key to how you capture images through the lens.

Here are some more details about perspective distortion:

Perspective Distortion – Distance

Many aspiring photographers believe in a common myth that the focal length is the real culprit for perspective distortion. The fact is, a rectilinear lens, irrespective of its focal length, will cause no distortion whereas a curvilinear lens will cause distortion.

Truly speaking, the wide-angle lens distorts images if the distance between the subject and the lens is small. The wide-angle lens causes no distortion of objects on its own. As you get closer to an object with your lens, regardless of its focal length, the images will have signs of distortion as light changes angles while entering the lens. The smaller the distance is, the greater the difference of the angles between the edges and the objects at the middle of the frame.

The issues are more evident in portraiture but the rule of distortion applies to any object you want to capture via your lens.

Perspective Distortion – Angles

If you stand in the middle of a railway track and look toward the horizon, the track will seem to converge to a point. The truth is, the track does not narrow but it seems so because, the more the distance, the smaller an object appears to our eyes. The same principle can be applied to a tall building.

Photographic lenses consider the phenomenon of perspective distortion.

If you tilt your camera to capture the top of a skyscraper, it will seem to get narrow due to its extension in the frame. This effect is known as “Keystoning”. If you set the camera at an angle left or right off the perpendicular from the base of the building, the same distortion willhappen but this time, on the horizontal axis.

How to make correction for angular distortion? Here are some ways to achieve perfection in this area:

• The commonest physical tactic is using a perspective control lens that lets shift. Most advanced PC lenses feature tilt and shift though the latter is most important to keep parallel lines from meeting at a point in the photograph. In large format view cameras, shift and tilt movements of the lens are allowed.
• Most popular software programs for post image-processing let you connect digitally for angular distortion. However, there is a serious disadvantage of digital correction and it is, the software programs create pixels where pixels were not visible.

Without any doubt, modern software is excellent at correcting angular distortion. However, in extreme cases, digital manipulation is quite evident and it is a big drawback of digital correction. A shift lens allows for optical correction and there is no need for digital file manipulation. In case, you are shooting film, optical method is the only way to make things right, unless negatives are scanned into digital format.