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File:Guildhall, City of London - Diliff.jpg

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Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 14 Jan 2014 at 23:33:26 (UTC)

Original – An interior view of the great hall of Guildhall in London, built between 1411 and 1440.
Reason
Guildhall is an interesting and historic building in Central London. It acts as a town hall for the City of London. This image is a highly detailed, perspective corrected view of the interior of the medieval Great Hall.
Articles in which this image appears
Guildhall, London
FP category for this image
Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Places/Interiors
Creator
User:Diliff
Because the perspective gets distorted by the height, it is appropriate to apply some correction. However, if you make your outermost verticals (the ones that usually lean in the most) perfectly parallel, then your eye doesn't really believe it. The building could only look like this if it is the size of a doll's house, or your eye had a lens the size of an astronomical telescope. The distortion caused by over-compensation is clearly apparent in the outermost hanging lanterns. Because we expect a tall building to loom inwards at the top, the parallel verticals make the building look as if its sides lean out. For this reason, as an architectural writer, I generally avoid images where the verticals have been made parallel and try to source the image that the photographer created before the digital adjustment. I am not recommending that the image should not be adjusted at all, but I'm suggesting that a lesser degree of adjustment, that allows the great height of the building to be experienced by the viewer, would be preferable. Amandajm (talk) 05:55, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know what the horizontal and vertical angle of view is here but suspect the vertical one is quite large and may be at the limit to what a rectilinear projection can achieve without significant distortion. It is taken from ground (eye) level so the projection's midpoint isn't high. The projection is the same whether achieved in software or by a lens. Look at my St Matthew's FP below. That wasn't a stitched/software photo but was taken with a 17mm crop lens (25.5 mm in 35mm terms). I was fortunate to be able to take it from the rear gallery so I'm at the midpoint vertically, which reduces vertical perspective distortion issues. I cropped this picture at the top to remove the circular iron light-holders nearest the camera (you can see the ones further away). I had to do this because they were at the corners of the wide-angle image and no longer elliptical but clearly wonky. People would have complained. As it turns out, I prefer the wider aspect picture and the height loss wasn't important. Now 25mm is just a standard wide angle, nothing extreme. So my point is these issues can occur with a normal wide angle lens and not just with a stitched image that takes rectilinear projection towards its limits. All projections to a 2D plane are distorted and unlike human vision (which is not a 2D plane at all) so it is a case of balancing the various distortions to create something pleasing. I agree that reducing vertical perspective correction can sometimes produce a more natural image and you are right that reality does make far-away ceilings smaller. -- Colin°Talk 08:38, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm surprised that as an architectural writer, you prefer non-corrected images. Almost all architectural photography is vertically corrected (where it is possible to correct), so I think you are going against the grain on that. Wikipedia's own article on Architectural photography states: "A tenet of architectural photography is the use of controlled perspective, with an emphasis on vertical lines that are non-converging (parallel). This is achieved by positioning the focal plane of the camera at so that it is perpendicular to the ground, regardless of the elevation of the camera eye. This result can be achieved by the use of view cameras, tilt/shift lenses, or post-processing." In the case of this image, I used post-processing, but the result is identical to any other method. There's nothing less authentic about it. I accept that for an interior (most interiors have a landscape aspect ratio), this has a fairly extreme correction at the ceiling, but I don't think that extreme leaning verticals would have looked aesthetically pleasing either. In any case, I agree with Colin that our eyes see a scene in a way that cannot be replicated in a 2D photo, so any attempt to do so must involve distortion of some kind. In addition, the visual perception system in our brain gives us the impression of taking in a scene all at once, but really we look around and absorb smaller aspects at a time, building up a 'virtual' picture of a scene that isn't necessarily geometrically accurate. Also, the eye has a natural field of view much wider on the horizontal axis than vertical, so any perspective leans that we see are even less pronounced vertically. Finally, the size of the building (doll's house or grand hall) has no relevance to how it appears. The issue is not the size of it, but the relative distance to it. If you could fit a camera inside the doll's house and pointed it upwards to the ceiling, you'd have exactly the same distortion/leaning of verticals. Likewise, if you could remove one of the walls and look into the Guildhall from a distance, you would be able to eliminate most of the leaning, certainly comparable to looking into a dollhouse. It's just geometry - size of the subject is irrelevant. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 10:19, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Guildhall, City of London - Diliff.jpg --Armbrust The Homunculus 23:33, 14 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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