Shooting Architecture - Question about lens and videography

[moxrox]

Iam still a beginner started this year with video and did shoot most of the time outdoor so far. Spent a week in Italy for vacation, even I had limited time for photography or video I did of course capture some scenes. I had problems with Architecture, vertical lines were sometimes aweful. Was shooting just with the 14-35mm Kit lens. With photography it can be corrected more easy with software, what are you doing with video during capturing and later in the workflow ?

Has the 14-35mm Kit lens a bigger problem here or is it similar to the 14-140 or other lenses which people use ? Hope someone is maybe around here and know the lens.

Btw when I do a panning on a tripod I have the problem that the horizontal line starts goint to be lopsided, I guess that is explaind with the angel.

How do you solve this ? Are you only panning so far that the horizont doesnt start to get wonky or are there other tricks maybe ?

Thx a lot for help =)

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Iam still a beginner started this year with video and did shoot most of the time outdoor so far. Spent a week in Italy for vacation, even I had limited time for photography or video I did of course capture some scenes. I had problems with Architecture, vertical lines were sometimes aweful. Was shooting just with the 14-35mm Kit lens. With photography it can be corrected more easy with software, what are you doing with video during capturing and later in the workflow ?

Has the 14-35mm Kit lens a bigger problem here or is it similar to the 14-140 or other lenses which people use ? Hope someone is maybe around here and know the lens.

Btw when I do a panning on a tripod I have the problem that the horizontal line starts goint to be lopsided, I guess that is explaind with the angel.

How do you solve this ? Are you only panning so far that the horizont doesnt start to get wonky or are there other tricks maybe ?

Thx a lot for help =)

Distortion of lines occurs in two ways essentially. 1) The lens curvature, especially at short lens lengths, occurs. rectilinear lenses cost more, and do a great a mount of correction. But still there will be some at some point, just less noticeable. 2) The image plane is not parallel to the flat surface of the subject. Any tilt or 'off' angle from parallel will induce 'line' convergence.

So, since you point your camera 'up' to get a tall building, the image plane is not parallel to the build wall, hence the convergent lines in the image.

There are lens shifters for 35mm film lenses, and operate somewhat like the adjustments one can perform on a view camera. But they are still limited relative to the view camera.

One can correct for some amount of this by transforming the image in an NLE. In Photoshop the Transform tool would be used. In After Effects, one can 'tilt' the plane of the clip in '3-d' space to correct. Don't know what is available for Premiere or Final Cut.

This operation usually causes black triangles to appear on the edges of the frame as the transform distorts the rectangular frame of the image... so one has to enlarge the image to cover these areas.

 

[moxrox]

Oh thx a lot for the deeper explanation about distortion and the software solution, good to know that it is possible to correct that like in photoshop. I did forget to mention that the lens is from panasonic for the GH2, sorry. Of course this is a cheaper lens and the distortion is probably worse than with more expensive lenses.

I guess you all try to avoid longer panning since the horizont gets wonky due to the angel of the tripod, will more carefully watch the next pans in some travel reports or other movies and count the seconds.

Thx =)