How to Keep Vertical Lines Vertical in Photographs: Number Two: Back Off

 

Rock City Barn RCB-TN-9. Highway 58, just south of Kingston, Tennessee.

Often the best way to keep vertical lines vertical in a photograph is simply to back off and find something interesting to fill the foreground while keeping the camera level and the lines of the subject vertical. We could use a zoom lens to accomplish the same effect. This is probably the technique I use most frequently. But it only works if there's something interesting in the foreground; something that tells us more about the main subject. Dead space with nothing of interest is only dead space. 

Here's another example:

Lee and Gordon Mill on Chickamauga Creek, Chickamauga, Georgia.

In this photograph, the turbulent water and the edge of a gravel bar serve to tell us something about the mill's location, while enabling me to keep the camera level and the lines of the old mill vertical.

About the photos: The barn was photographed with a Canon EOS A2 with the EF 24-85mm lens on Fujichrome 100 film. For the mill, I used an Olympus E-M5 digital camera with a Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm lens. If you read the information I supply with most blog posts, you'll note that I use zoom lenses most of the time.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography   travel     photo techniques     Rock City Barns     old mills     film photography     Fujichrome film     Canon EOS A2 camera     Canon EF 24-85mm lens     Olympus E-M5 digital camera     Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm lens

Keeping Vertical Lines Vertical in Photographs: Number One: Use Software

What's wrong with this picture? (Macon County Courthouse, Oglethorpe, Georgia.)

Dave, a friend and fellow photographer and photo-blogger visited me recently. As we were looking through one of my books, he asked "How do you keep the vertical lines in your photos straight?"

Many photographers seem to have trouble keeping  vertical lines vertical in their pictures. The problem is caused by pointing the camera up, even slightly, at a building or other vertical subject, and will cause the subject to appear to be leaning backward, like the courthouse above. I've seen quite a few of Dave's photographs and haven't noticed that he has as much of a problem with this as he thinks, but it is a common problem.

The Macon County Courthouse with correction applied with PTLens.

There are a number of ways to keep verticals vertical, so let's take a few posts to explore them. This, by the way, is part of what photographers call perspective control.

Solution # One: Do it with software. (Also called the "easy way out.")  I don't have a current version of Photoshop, so I'm not sure, but I believe Photoshop now has a way you can do perspective control. You can also do it in various RAW converters, such as Capture One and DXO. I use a free, standalone program called PTLens to do perspective correction, and it works well for me, although maybe not as convenient as some other programs. 

In any case, using software to correct perspective is kinda a last resort for me. I always try to get it right in the camera if I can. Sometimes I can't. We'll be talking about ways to get it right in the camera in future posts. 

Meanwhile, here's another example of perspective correction with PTLens:

The Simmons-Bond Bread & Breakfast Inn, Toccoa, Georgia.

The Simmons-Bond B&B has a couple of problems: It's falling over backward, and it's too dark.

What did I do? I lightened the exposure with the Curves tool in Photoshop and corrected the perspective in PTLens. In fact, I think I may have over-corrected slightly, which is easy to do.

About the photos: Both were made with a Fuji X-H1 camera and the Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens.

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography   travel     Toccoa, Georgia     Macon County, Georgia      Fuji X-H1 camera     Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens     Perspective Control     RAW converters     Photoshop     Capture One     DXO     PTLens

The Backroads Traveler: Toccoa, Georgia

 The Neoclassical Revival Stephens County Courthouse in Toccoa was built in 1907-08.

 The first time I saw Toccoa, I didn't actually see it. I came in the early dark of a winter evening and left in the dark.

I wasn't a bandit. I was a basketball player, and my college was playing Toccoa Falls College. This was in the late 1950s, and we played them on their court twice that I remember, traveling through the mountains from Chattanooga in a fleet of cars. There was no easy way to get there in those days.

The next time I came to Toccoa was in the late 80s, as a photographer making pictures for the college's promotional and student recruitment publications. I came again in 2016, again as a photographer, making pictures and gathering material for my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.

And finally, we camped there in our RV on two different occasions in 2021 as I was working on the second edition of the Backroads book.

The Greek Revival Toccoa Presbyterian Church was built in 1925-26.

Perspective corrected with the PTLens plug-in.

All the above says more about me, of course, than it does about Toccoa, a pleasant, small city of about 9,000 in the mountains of far northeast Georgia, about 90 miles from Atlanta. It's in a beautiful, scenic, area, with the Tallulah Gorge only a few miles away and the waterfall right there on the edge of town.

 Toccoa Falls. Nineteen feet higher than Niagara. But not as much water. Usually.

Everything is peaceful these days, but it wasn't always. Taking in the serene beauty of the setting, it's hard to grasp that this was once a scene of terror. In the early morning hours of November 6, 1976, five days of constant rain caused a rupture of the earthen dam that held a 40-acre lake above the falls, sending a wall of water surging through the campus, destroying much of the married students’ housing, killing 39 people, and injuring 60 more. Prayers, expressions of sympathy, and contributions to rebuild the campus poured in from all around the globe. Today, few signs of the physical damage remain and it's quite safe (and a worthwhile trip) to visit the falls. Admission is free. Call 706-886-7299 for hours. 

About the photos: The courthouse was photographed with a Canon EOS 6D and Canon EF 28-105mm lens; the Presbyterian Church with a Fuji X-H1 and Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens, and the waterfall was photographed with an Olympus E-M5 and Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm lens. 

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography   travel     Stephens County, Georgia     Toccoa, Georgia     Toccoa Falls     Toccoa Falls College     Tallulah Gorge     Canon EOS 6D    Canon EF 28-105mm lens     Fuji X-H1     Fujicron XC 16-50mm lens     Olympus E-M5     Panasonic Lumix G Vario 14-140mm lens

My Post-Processing Technique

Ridgeway Baptist Church, Fannin County, Georgia. Built in 1865.

For 35 years most of my photographs were made with slide film. Shooting slides will teach you to get it right in the camera, because if you get it wrong, there isn't much you can do about it. One stop of underexposure can be corrected, but slides overexposed by a stop or more are usually a dead loss unless you're trying for some kind of ethereal effect. I work at metering accurately and getting the exposure right in the camera, because if I do that, there isn't much left to do in post-processing. 

Digital files are different from film, of course, but even so, many of the same principles apply. My goal is always to do as little post-processing as possible. Here's how I work with digital files:

1. I have two major folders titled Professional Photography and Personal Photography. Under each major folder are many sub-folders titled by subject. I upload the files into my computer and into the major folders, creating new folders and sub-folders as necessary. Since I have my camera set to shoot both RAW and jpeg files simultaneously, each folder will contain both types of files. I edit the files and delete any I don't want to keep.

2. I then move the folder into a program called ACDSee and separate the RAW files from the jpegs by telling the program to sort the files by type. I move each type of file into sub-folders labeled, strangely enough, RAW and OoC (Out of Camera) Jpegs. I primarily work with jpegs, but keep the RAW files as backup. If a file is too poorly exposed or too off-color to be corrected as a jpeg, it can usually be corrected in the RAW conversion software (I use Capture One) and output as a jpeg, which goes into another sub-folder labeled Processed Jpegs.

3. If the jpeg files need any further work, I open them in Photoshop. I have a very old version (CS-2), but it does everything I need it to do.

My primary tool in Photoshop is Curves. With Curves, I can make small corrections in exposure and color balance. If a file needs more correction than I can make in Curves, I should have corrected it in the RAW conversion software before it got to this point.

Other tools I use frequently in Photoshop are the Brush tool and the Crop tool. The Brush tool enables me to darken or lighten specific areas of the picture, just like burning and dodging in the darkroom. The Crop tool, obviously, is used to crop the picture to best effect when I didn't (or couldn't) get it framed just right in the camera.

One other tool I use on most of my photographs is an Unsharp Masking enhancement that improves the internal contrast of a file without affecting the very lightest and darkest areas. To use it, open a file, click on Filter/Sharpen/Unsharp Mask. Set the Amount to 20%, the Radius to 60 pixels, and the Threshold to 0. It adds a bit of sparkle, and I think you'll like the effect on most of your files. I have it set up as a preset so I can apply it easily and quickly when I want to. 

So that's basically what I do. It isn't very complicated, and it gives me files I'm happy with. My guiding principal is to do only what could have been done in a darkroom. YMMV.

Ridgeway Baptist Church before post-processing.

Here's the way the church looked before processing in Photoshop. What did I do? First, the church was about a stop too light, so I darkened it using Curves. The gravel at the bottom, the left side, the roof, and the foliage in the upper left were still too bright, so I used the Brush tool set to 30% to burn them in and used the Unsharp Mask preset to add a bit of mid-tone contrast. Finally, I lightened the sign a bit with the Brush tool and used the Select tool to isolate the sign and applied the Unsharp Mask tool to just the sign to make it more readable. That's all. Most of what I did could have been done in a darkroom.

I bought my first digital camera, a Canon 10D, in 2003. At a price of $3,000, I had to sell some very good film cameras in order to buy it. And then, at the age of 63, I began teaching myself Photoshop. I didn't like it much then and I don't like it much now. And I am terminally sick of learning new software! That's why I don't upgrade software unless I have to. And since I can do what I want to do with what I have, why bother? (End of rant.)

Signed copies of my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia are available. The price is $22.95 plus $4.50 shipping. My PayPal address is djphoto@vol.com (which is also my email). Or you can mail me a check to 8943 Wesley Place, Knoxville, TN 37922. Include your address and tell me how you would like your book inscribed.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2024 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.

Tags:   photography   film photography    slide film   Capture One    Photoshop     ACDSee     Canon EOS 10D           Photoshop techniques     Fannin County, Georgia