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Distortion w/ PowerShot A1100 IS

JayEll
Apprentice

What setting should I be using so that my photos of a large room don't come out with almost a "fisheye" effect? The vertical lines are kind of tilted, as though the camera can't "see" perspective. 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

That is correct, and it goes for every camera. The reason some cameras have less pronounced distortion is the amount of wide angle allowed. The wider the angle, the worse it gets. So in other words, a camera with a 35mm lens at the wide angle has less distortion than a camera with a 28mm wide aqngle lens. The trick is in knowing how to take the photo to reduce the phenomenon. With the wider angle, such as the 28mm lens, you can get more in the view, so stepping back will get more of the photo into the less distorted area, producing a much more even perspective. By zooming in a little, most of the distortion will disappear. The other settings such as Auto, Easy, Indoor, etc, are for exposure levels, and have nothing to do with the camera image perspective. That is all in the zoom range, or better known as focal lengths. The longer the focal length, the less the distortion, but the less width you get in the view.

 

Steve M.

 

 

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5 REPLIES 5

smack53
Mentor

JayEll,

 

That fisheye effect is inherent to wide angles, and there would be nothing you could change in your camera to fix that. In order to reduce the effect, you would need to be as far back as you could get, and zoom in a little to reduce the distortions of the vertical items. Hold the camera about as high as the mid height of the room, and keep the camera as level as you can. In other words, don't point the camera up or down as this increases the distortions.

 

On more professional cameras, there are tilt shift lenses that can compensate for some of the fisheye effect, or they can use an even wider lens and zoom in to get the frame they want. But with your camera, these are not options. There are softwares that can help you in post processing, such as photoshop elements, but depending on the severity of the fisheye effect, even those have limitations.

 

One other option is to take a series of shots and use software to stitch the shots together into a panoramic view. It can help reduce the edge distortions quite a bit, but it does require spending some extra money and time to correct the undesirable result you are getting.

 

Steve M.

Thanks for your answer. So it doesn't matter whether I have it on Auto, Easy, Indoor, etc? That's really a drawback.

That is correct, and it goes for every camera. The reason some cameras have less pronounced distortion is the amount of wide angle allowed. The wider the angle, the worse it gets. So in other words, a camera with a 35mm lens at the wide angle has less distortion than a camera with a 28mm wide aqngle lens. The trick is in knowing how to take the photo to reduce the phenomenon. With the wider angle, such as the 28mm lens, you can get more in the view, so stepping back will get more of the photo into the less distorted area, producing a much more even perspective. By zooming in a little, most of the distortion will disappear. The other settings such as Auto, Easy, Indoor, etc, are for exposure levels, and have nothing to do with the camera image perspective. That is all in the zoom range, or better known as focal lengths. The longer the focal length, the less the distortion, but the less width you get in the view.

 

Steve M.

 

 

I'm still puzzled about one thing. I used to use non-digital cameras, even the "disposable" kind, and I never had the problem with "fisheye" effect. They weren't big lenses, either! And yet, in my photos, walls were all straight, nothing was slanting strangely... So I would think it must be some kind of effect generated by the electronic imaging in conjunction with the lens.

Those older film cameras typically did not have very wide angle lenses on them. To give you some insight, the eye sees proportions about the same as a 50mm wide angle lens, which is very typical of the older film cameras. Most digital cameras use a much wider angle lens, typically 28mm to 35mm, so the distortion begins to become much more noticeable. If you zoom to about 50mm on a digital camera, you will see very little distortion as you would be seeing more like your eye. The camera cannot discern what we see as periphery vision (to the sides) the same as the human eye, so the digital sensor sees everything in a flat plane of view, whereas we see in 3 dimensions. Therefore, the view to the sides gets out of proportion, which we see as distorted.

 

Hope that clears it up a little.

 

Steve M.

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