Sleeklens Archives - DIY Photography

When you’re photographing interiors or tall buildings, perspective distortion is often inevitable. There’s ways around it with tilt shift lenses or large format film cameras, but for most of us that’s not an option. These days, Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop and other tools provide a number of fancy automated ways to help correct for this. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t quite hit the mark, and we need to step in and do it manually.

This particular type of perspective distortion is commonly known as “converging verticals”. It’s caused by things getting smaller as they get further away from the camera. It’s essentially the same thing you see when looking down a straight set of train tracks that seem to eventually arrive at a point. Only, this happens vertically when shooting up or down on objects oriented vertically. Fixing it manually is fairly simple and straightforward. This video from the folks at Sleeklens shows us how.

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The transition from film to digital eliminated problems that plagued many photographers. Things like reciprocity failure were now a thing of the past. But, it presented a few new challenges, too. The biggest of those is dust. Things have gotten better over the years. We’ve made the shift from CCD to CMOS sensors, which seem to attract less dust. We’ve got automatic dust cleaning features in most DSLRs now, too.

These days, I’ve found the majority of dust can be gotten rid of with a good blast or two from a rocket blower. It’s rare I have to take a swab to a sensor any more. Sometimes, though, you get those stubborn bits that just don’t seem to shift, and you don’t have time to send it off or clean it properly. They’re fairly easy to fix in post, though. This video from Sleeklens shows you how to quickly and easily remove sensor dust in Lightroom.

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