Trouble photographing skyscrapers

[Myron]

I have been trying to photograph the progress being made in construction of the new 1 World Trade Center here in New York. All my photographs are ruined because I get swervy lines on areas of high-detail such as windows. What causes this? It never happened with film cameras. Is it that digital cameras cannot support such detail? I have been using 6 MP. Would increasing to 10 MP help? I have no other problems except with skyscrapers. Any help would be appreciated.

[Andy Stanton]

I'm not sure what you mean by "swervy lines". A couple of things to consider, though, when photographing buildings. One is that, from a ground perspective, the sides of the buildings are not going to look perfectly perpendicular to the ground - they are going to look tilted. This is not a defect in the camera but a function of optics. Secondly when shooting at extreme zoom or extreme wide angle you're likely to have some lens distortion - pin cushion distortion at zoom (sides curving in) and barrel distortion at wide angle (sides bulging out). Some lenses exhibit pin cushion and barrel distortion more than others.

[KCook]

Have you printed any of these shots? Still see those jaggy edges on the print? I bet not.

Pixel peeping can show jaggies, especially with low Mp images. And excessive sharpening can also make high contrast edges rough. With a simple point-and-shoot camera, especially an older one, you may not be able to do anything about that. But the more advanced P&S cameras let you set Fine JPG compression, and milder sharpening. Both moves, especially taken together, should tame the jaggies. If not, then time to move on to a RAW camera. With the additional burden of advanced image processing on the computer.

Kelly Cook

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