“High precision” geometrically accurate architectural photography often requires positioning the camera perfectly parallel to a face of the subject. (View camera movements let you reposition the frame once the camera’s in position.)
It’s relatively easy to level the camera horizontally and vertically using spirit levels. The hard part is getting the z axis parallel to the structure. There’s no easy way to do this in general other than carefully aligning horizontal lines in preview.
… but sometimes you can do it more systematically using science.
In this case, I attached a laser to the building surface (pointing perpendicular from the building) and mirror attached to the front of the lens, abusing a kit designed for aligning enlargers. You rotate the (leveled) camera until the reflection of the laser lines up with the source.
This doesn’t work if you don’t have physical access to the structure you’re photographing, and is definitely not inconspicuous.
You have to put the laser directly in front of the lens, so it hits the mirror. In the case of this photo, that was actually midway up the steps, so I put the laser there and aligned it using the back of the step. Fortunately, the building itself was pretty well parallel with the staircase and the surface was flat and level. I guess you’d expect Masons to have high standards for their masonry.
Architectural photography looks a lot like surveying.
@mattblaze First, that's a cool trick, and second, that is a shockingly impressive level of detail in that photograph. Well worth the trip to flickr to grab the original.
@dave_andersen yeah, if you look closely you can see that there’s a mesh netting behind the pillars, presumably to keep birds from using the space to spy on them.
It's worth noting that you can correct the subject geometry in postprocessing (using Capture One, Photoshop, etc) but it costs both pixels and toil. And while it's relatively easy to do postprocessing correction of a single axis, it's tedious to do two, and god help you if you need to correct all three.
A bit of time adjusting a decent XYZ geared tripod head before you capture the photo pays the effort back tenfold.
@mattblaze I"m so happy with horizon leveling tools in modern camera displays (including iPhones and Pixel phones). Google also tells you if you're pointed up or down, which is also handy at times for me.
@mattblaze And hence you see way too many retouched photos where the editor just clicked "auto perspective" without checking the results for plausibility.
@mattblaze Sometimes I heard about tilt and shift lenses for those purposes, but they always seemed too much expensive (and likely overkill) for an amateur photographer (and not a pro) like me
@Blob_Calder Right? It has a serious "no, we definitely do not have a back room where we perform ritual sacrifices, why ever would you think that?" vibe, but it's basically just cosplaying being a cult, I as far as I can tell.
@jyasskin The lens was moved off center from the sensor, first to the left for one exposure and then to the right for a second exposure, yielding two images from the same perspective, but showing different sides of the scene. Then they were stitched together, yielding a wider image that you'd be able to get with a single exposure.
@grissallia@jyasskin No - for stereographs you need the two photos to be from slightly different perspectives. (So you need either to move the whole camera or use a special camera with two lenses a few inches apart)
@mattblaze Have you not been inside? It's just as weird and spooky on the inside: Swords hanging on the walls, cryptic Latin and Greek inscriptions, two actual corpses entombed in the walls, etc. Take the tour sometime. It's fun and free.
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