What's wrong with this picture?

semrich

semrich

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Forget dust spots and lack of cropping, why is the building with the banner of Ataturk looking like it is about to fall into the Bosphorus while the horizontal shoreline and the vertical ships masts are true.

This just doesn't make any sense to me, is it some mistake on my part or a problem with the camera?

This was taken with my Rolleiflex 3.5 Tessar.

Any light that can be shed on this would be appreciated.
 

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You didn't supply the pic, but my guess from your description is that you tilted the camera up, and this results in converging verticals. Shorelines recede too if you're at an angle to it, and so it's entirely possible to tilt the camera in such a way that the lower foreground appears level, verticals on one side of the frame appear vertical, and verticals on the other side tilt inward. Fortunately, this "perspective distortion" is a natural optical effect common to all cameras, and can be "fixed" in good software.
 
To me a small amount of rotation on that image puts everything in place and the converging verticals look interesting!
 

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Thanks everyone, I know about converging verticals, very often when I shoot wide angle with the 35's I have the CV bubble level in the hot shoe, but not hot shoe on the Rollei so this one threw me a bit because the masts were straight and the water line was level.

Thanks to Keith's tweaking I can now see that the masts needed to be converging to balance it out.
 
You can correct the verticals (to some extent) by tilting the easel when you print or, digitally, with Photoshop.
 

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Its a little too much though, to be explained with perspective only. And the scan should be sharper.

You sure the negative looks like this on the light table ? Maybe it was curled when scanning.

Roland.
 
ferider said:
Its a little too much though, to be explained with perspective only. And the scan should be sharper.

You sure the negative looks like this on the light table ? Maybe it was curled when scanning.

Roland.
Click to expand...

The 75mm taking lens is not a very wide angle lens on the Rolleiflex, so seeing such a tilt is not due to only tilting the lens upward. Something else is causing this effect.
 
Keith has the right fix...the shoreline should be at a slight upward angle due to camera position...if you were shooting this straight on then the shoreline would be straight across the picture...
As always, a day late and a dollar short...
 
The ship is listing, as is the building. Shortly after the photo was taken, one sank, and the other was condemned.
 
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