When scrolling through galleries of photos for residential (and some commercial) properties, it always seems like the perspective is off. But each picture seems a little differently off – almost like a fisheye lens, but not. What are they using to do that and why has that “look” become industry standard, even when we all know the pictures aren’t true to life?
In: Technology
Everyone is mentioning highly edited high dynamic range photos, which is one thing, but one thing I don’t see here is the use of a tilt shift lens!
But first, let’s backtrack a bit. For a lot of architectural photography, to capture the architecture itself in context with the area around it, you would use a wide angle lens. You can get wide angle fish eye lenses (characterized by circular distortion that makes things look bulbous), but this is not preferred as it doesn’t keep the lines in your photos straight. For this, you need a wide angle rectilinear lens. [You can see the difference here.](https://www.pano-guru.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/fisheye_vs_wideangle1.jpg)
But that’s not all. Usually when you’re photographing a house, you want to have the whole house in frame. So you tilt the camera up as it’s a tall structure, but what ends up happening is that you have all the lines pointing inward as it goes up. Well that might not be very representative of the house. So many architectural photographers use a tilt shift lens. [It’s a lens with glass elements that can be angled to shift the plane of focus (and light) to correct for this change in perspective](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2015/04/tiltshiftheader.jpg)
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