PERSPECTIVE

I learned a little about perspective when I was a little kid and my mother was driving my kid sister and me to the Beach at Point Lookout. We were driving down a causeway and I asked why the road seemed to narrow to a point somewhere in the distance.

"That's perspective," my mother announced. I guess that satisfied me until the term came up again, years later, in a high school art class. We were learning to draw 3 dimensional boxes and had to draw a vanishing point, somewhere. I guess that satisfied my curiosity because all of a sudden, my boxes had dimension.

Years later, in photo school, I discovered that lenses of varying focal lengths could do strange things with perspective. Somehow, my curiosity hasn't been satisfied ever since.

In the intervening 50 years I have learned to use lenses to control or accentuate perspective. I love it. It gives me creative control. This is one of those wonderful places where art and science combine and if you know how to use it, you can make wonderful photographs.

Today was one of those occasions. But, science conspired against me. Until I used another science to rectify the problem. Confused? Let me explain.

One of my assignments involved the opening of some new apartment housing for the homeless. I refused to shoot the dog and pony show of a ribbon cutting that was arranged by the politicians and bank officials. I asked to be able to photograph some of the individuals who will be benefitting from this arrangement. Surprisingly enough, I was taken to an apartment where a woman agreed to be photographed. One of her next door neighbors popped in and I photographed them both with coffee cups, sitting at the kitchen table, with the living room showing in the background. In order to show all of this, I reached into my camera bag and grabbed my 20-35mm zoom lens and snapped it onto my camera and cranked the glass back to 20mm. I knew that a lens that wide would keystone vertical planes if the camera were tilted up or down. So I got down on my arthritic knee and shot at eye level. All of the verticals remained vertical. But, I couldn't see much of the living room in the background.

Oh well. If I were using a view camera, I could adjust the rising front and correct for the distortion. But, a Nikon F5 is not a view camera. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do. So, I stood up and pointed the camera down at the subjects in the foreground. I showed them and the living room background. But, at the expense of keystoning walls. Compromise. That's the name of the game.

Later on, at the scanner, I looked at the first shots that I made from eye level, and then the ones where I stood up. There was no question that I had to use the second shot, in spite of the distortion. As I adjusted the contrast, brightness and color balance, I bemoaned the fact that in a wet darkroom, I could have propped up one end of the enlarger easel in order to minimize the distortion.

Bill Davis, at the next scanning station told me that Sal D'Aguano, a former darkroom technician who now is one of the resident expert scanners, had showed him how to correct keystoning in Photoshop.

"SAAAAAAL!"

Good old Sal. He showed me what to do. If you don't know how, here it is in a nut shell. First you have to scan your photo at a higher resolution than normal since you will be losing a lot of it when you make your corrections and final crop. Then under the Select Menu, select All. Next go to the Edit Menu and select Transform and in the sub-menu select Perspective. (Notice how cleverly I wove this into the title of this piece. Sometimes I amaze myself.) Now, if you take your cursor (which becomes an arrow) to one of the points at the top (in this case) and drag it toward the top center of your photo, you will narrow the top edge of the photo and your verticals will straighten out. (If I had pointed the camera up instead of down, I would have to narrow the bottom portion of the photo.) It still doesn't look correct. You have to take the crop tool from your tool bar, and crop from the narrowest points at the top of your photo in order to square off all four sides. I have included an original scan as well as the one adjusted for perspective so that you can see the difference. You can also see that you will lose a goodly portion of your photo. BUT, straight lines are straight, once again,

Jeez, I don't know how many times I have bitched about having to submit photos that keystoned. I HATE keystoning. Walls just don't lean like that. And now they don't have to, anymore. Thank you, Photoshop.

Thank you, Sal. Life IS good. I'm 67 now and I thought that I must know it all. But, I've only scratched the surface. I'm gonna try to live to be a hundred. Can you imagine the advances that will come to pass in the next 33 years? WOW!

Photos by Dick Kraus © 1999 Newsday

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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