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| The St. Helens Apartments, Chehalis |
Yesterday we
went into the small town of Chehalis, Washington. It is quite quaint and there are lots of old
buildings which have been kept up. I
particularly liked the St. Helens Apartments, which has an antiquated outside
fire escape. The most interesting
feature of the building though is its irregular quadrilateral shape, with one
end being very narrow and the other end is quite wide.
The image on
the left was my original shot. Without a
PC (perspective control) lens it is almost impossible to capture a tall
building without showing significant signs of perspective. Perspective is the appearance of objects
getting smaller as they get further from you.
We see it all the time in stretches of railway or road as they move away
from us, becoming little more than a hairline in the far distance. Buildings suffer from this form of distortion
because we are much closer to the bottom than the top. In the shot above, I am also closer to the
left side than the right side, and so the image suffers from perspective along
two planes.
I used
Photoshop to correct the distortion by evoking the perspective editing tool. This helped me compensate for the vertical
change in perspective. I used the
distort editing tool afterward to give the building its apparent height, as I
find changing perspective usually gives the image a squashed appearance. Lastly, to compensate for the left to right
change in perspective, I employed the use of the skew editing tool. Together the changes produce the image you
see on the right.
Although the
left image is what my eye saw, it is the right one which I saw in my mind’s eye
– the way it should look if perspective was not an issue. Of course, I played with white balance,
contrast, exposure, curves, and a few other tools to get the shot just the way
I wanted it. This is precisely why I
shoot in RAW mode; it gives me the greatest post editing potential without compromising
the image significantly.
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