Photo Quickies

PhotoQuickie’s noticed an interesting thing in our world, surprisingly many buildings seem to be influenced by the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Extremely skeptical about the sanity of this idea, we did some research into why the buildings centered in our photos were straight and those near the edges were crooked.

PhotoQuickie can happily confess that it is due to a phenomenon called Barrel Distortion and not a new trend in architecture. Quickly, barrel distortion makes the outer areas of our photos curved due to the spherical nature of the lens. Here’s a cropped example.

The building on the right is more or less straight (PhotoQuickie can assure you that we were not drunk while taking this picture), while there is a noticable gap seen in the blue rectangle between the building and the vertical line.

There is hardly anything that PhotoQuickie can do about our camera’s barrel distortion (aside from keeping it in mind when buying a new camera). For the photos on the other hand, we can doctor them with our favorite photo editing software. PhotoQuickie’s friends who are using Photoshop can try these easy tips from Ken Rockwell to fix up barrel distortion in their photos.

Read more about: Barrel Distortion,

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Terminology, Photo Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.