It’s not often I take a pic I don’t find myself agonising over the processing of.
There was a satirical comedy film (The Big Bus I think) where one of the characters was nicknamed ‘Shoulders’, because of his history of driving buses into the shoulder of the road.
I seem to have a similar affliction, but involves not holding the camera level, or ‘normal’, to the plane of the scene, meaning the verticals and horizontals end up at silly angles, and there is always some sort of perspective I have to fix.
I wouldn’t mind so much, but they often STILL come that way even when I remember to take care over this, and they looked fine in the viewfinder before I took the pic 😩
Actually, having started to analyse some of these pics, it seems it’s not all my fault, and the perspective of the scene, when seen within the frame of the pic, as opposed to being seen by the eye in real life, changes completely when seen in isolation.
This was purely a test pic, for my own satisfaction, captured in a series of shots after I happened to glance up into the sky and saw this near horizon to horizon high altitude contrail.
I had to grab it, as I’d been suffering some frustration in recent cold nights, where I had spotted the same thing as a ghostly trail in the night sky, but couldn’t even try to capture it as it was so dark, and the difference between the contrail (again, horizon to horizon) was almost too subtle to see. This would have needed a true extreme wide angle lens to capture. Even this it would probably not have been possible, as these always seemed to pass directly overhead, so a fisheye would probably have been the only way.
Back to this daylight one, and I really didn’t know the best way to catch it. In the past I’ve tried to catch extreme (near 180°) views, only to find the orientation of the camera caused issues with the final image stitching, due to distortion. In this case, I tried what I thought took the most linear set of images, and it seemed to work.
I was only looking at the contrail, and not bothered about filling in the unrelated areas – but it would have been nice to have had the tree. However, at the time I was too busy cursing it, for getting in the way of the contrail I was trying to catch.
I did try to make the software render the contrail as a straight line – let’s just say that’s not how you see it in reality, you only the straight section in your field of view and can’t see what the rest looks like, and that effort was definitely NOT pleasing to the eye.
Secret Scotland 