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Perspective Control with a Nikon CP950 Digital Camera
Below are three versions of the same photo taken with a Nikon CP950 digital camera. The digital photos were originally taken by Yee Kai Choong and Photoshop alterations were done by Kerry Davison. The image to the far left is the original shot taken straight from the digital camera with no adjustments other than resizing and sharpening with Photoshop's unsharp mask.
Left Photo: Original unaltered photo. Note that the vertical lines of the building are not parallel and the building hence looks tilted. The horizontal lines of the building are non-parallel too, causing the roof of the building to be inclined more steeply upward than the horizontal ledge near the bottom of the building.
Center Photo: This photo was created by editing the leftmost photo in Photoshop in an attempt to make the vertical lines of the building parallel to each other. I used "Select All" then "Edit" "Transform" "Perspective". Once satisfied with the perspective, I cropped it back into a rectangular image.
Right Photo: This photo was
created by editing the leftmost photo in Photoshop in an attempt to make the vertical and horizontal lines
rectilinear. As before, I used "Select All" then "Edit"
"Transform" "Perspective". In this case it appears as though
I elongated the image slightly in the horizontal direction but this could be
easily corrected in Photoshop if desired. Note that we now have a fairly
normal looking frontal view of the building even though the original camera position
was off at an angle to the building.
One problem remaining in these perspective corrections is that the CP950 has substantial barrel distortion which causes vertical lines to appear curved rather than merely converging. It should be possible to straighten these out with additional work in Photoshop. This problem does not seem to exist to any significant degree in 35mm photography when using either an Olympus Stylus Epic (35mm/f2.8) or a Nikkor 24mm/f2.8 prime lens. I have seen this problem to various degrees on some wide angle lenses and consumer zooms for 35mm, but the barrel distortion on the CP950 is more severe than on any 35mm optics that I've used. While the barrel distortion is a comparatively subtle problem in the photos above, below is a more spectacular example:
Examples
of Perspective Control with Nikkor PC lenses for 35mm Photography
Examples of Perspective Control with an Olympus Stylus Epic Camera
