This past weekend I did a photo shoot for a local S2000 member. He wanted it done on top of a parking structure. Looking at all my shots I have seen that the car is level, but the background is not. Here is just a pretty standard and boring head on shot.



This same issue applies to the side profile shots that I took. I personally can't stop looking at the windows on the building, and noticing they are not level and square in the frame. What can I do? What should I have done? The shots are taken. In a few shots I rotated the pictures just slightly so the car is level, but it puts the background out of kilter a little more.

 

^ This might not be the best example. Looking at this shot now, I could probably rotate it slightly counter clockwise, and it would get better. Below might be a better example. I got the car how I like it, but the background is off.

 

I was going to say that it looked like the parking deck wasn't level, but I can see from the next row of windows down, where they just show above the top of the parking structure, that the deck is level. (or at least the railing is.)

So it looks like keystone effect, caused by the perspective foreshortening of the building on the left side of the frame. To prevent that, keep the plane of the sensor parallel with the plane of the building. Or in other words, if the axis of your lens is going to be perpendicular to the building, make sure it is exactly perpendicular in both directions. So for your first image, you'd pan to the left a little bit.

A better approach, to avoid sensitivity to keystone distortion of the building in the background, would be to not frame the car so nearly head-on to the building. Move to the left or right so you're aiming at something closer to a 45 degree angle to the building.

 

I think either way if you try to line up the background or the car, its very jarring and distracting. Imo, I think i would try to stay away from the building as the background, but maybe find simpler backgrounds.

Great shots! though I would like to see a different background. I feel like my eyes are constantly battling it out asking "is the car completely horizontal, or is the background horizontal but the car is not?"

 

Thank you guys. This is my first time encountering such an issue. I typically use simpler backgrounds, or a nice desert backdrop. This shoot was for a customer, and there was a group of us hanging out, so I went with what the customer wanted location wise.

I am always very critical and I wonder if I had not pointed it out, how many people would notice right away. Well I expect people in this forum to pick it up, but people in the gallery not so much. Thank you for the compliments. Check out the link in my signature for the rest of the shoot. Some of the pictures came out great. First time out shooting in months...Need to get back out asap.

 

I agree with rotordyn, but would like to phrase it as, the car wasn't perpendicular to the building, so when you shot the car head on, your camera sensor wasn't parallel.

Could you have used a larger aperture to blur the background a little bit? That could help mitigate the differences. In addition, be careful when framing to keep lines like the bottom of the row of windows away from the edge of the frame. The closer things like that are, the more obvious it is when they aren't level.

 

+1 simplest thing to do is draw the eye to the subject with correct use of aperture. If your intent is to not show the background and in this shot why would it be? Properly use your aperture to show the subject in a non distracting manner.

 

There's a couple things going on here in the picture.

1. When you took the shot, you took it at a slight angle. Not very noticeable, but when we add a perfectly straight line to your original, we see that the both the background and the car are not perfectly straight.



2. There is a slight slope on the parking structure. Having rotated the picture slightly, we can see that once the car is perfectly straight, the building still has a slight skew to it. That shows that either the building or the structure have a slope. I'm guessing the parking structure, though could be a combination of the two.



That being said, not a whole lot you can do. What I would suggest is taking a clean shot of the background without the car, then a shot with the car. Take the 2 shots into Photoshop and mask out the straightened background.

 

Thank you everyone! This is why I like posting in here, I get the feedback I need. This was def my first time ever shooting something, that basically has 3 seperate sections, and I have learned a lot from it.

 

No problem dude. Always here to help.