Lens Distortion

Last year around this time I was exploring the way lenses distort reality. All lenses distort reality to some extent. (This, in my opinion, puts paid to the purist argument about the truth of images taken directly from the camera without further processing as against images that have been altered or enhanced after being downloaded from the camera.) Notice in the top photo how the Hatley Castle's walls appear to slope inward. This was caused by using an ultra-wide angle lens at its widest setting (10mm) in order to get the whole building inside the frame. The problem I was trying to deal with had to do with how to correct this lens distortion. The solution I found is below. Sometime later I returned to Hatley Castle and took a whole series of shots (10) with a 50mm lens. 50mm lenses are generally agreed to produce photos that are most like what our eyes see. These were then stitched together and straightened using software called Hugin. It produces enormous panoramas (the original of the shot below is over 10,000 pixels wide). The end result (below) is certainly much closer to what we see. The next challenge is to photograph the Legislative Assembly Buildings using the same technique. Stay tuned!