And our eyes certainly don??™t make very tall buildings look
like they??™re all akimbo. Digital cameras, though, with their limited ability to capture perspective
and no brain to make adjustments on the fly, do exactly that. What am I talking about? Check out
the following illustration, which I took in Las Vegas.
If you look closely, you can see that the Paris Hotel behind the Eiffel Tower is not square
and true. Instead, it leans in at the top, as if it??™s narrower up there than it is at the base. That??™s a
problem, because most real buildings aren??™t shaped that way. And to be sure, this one isn??™t either.
It??™s a distortion caused by perspective??”one that we usually don??™t think about in real life, but it
leaps out of pictures in a pretty obvious way.
I think you??™ll agree that we??™d all like to avoid this sort of thing. Perspective distortion creeps
into photos whenever you??™re shooting something very tall, and it gets worse the closer you are
when you take the picture. As a result, you need to tip the camera up to include all of it in the
frame, and it??™s that action??”setting the lens at an angle to the subject??”that creates the distortion.
CHAPTER 14: Clean Up Your Images 301
One way to minimize this problem is by selecting your subjects carefully.
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