“Architectural Photography of Tall Buildings” by Paul Bartholomew is a play-by-play of the photographer’s thought process on a job that required him to capture towering Manhattan buildings without converging lines.
Of course I didn’t say it was 100% possible, but with an agreement to proceed I offered to scout each location so I can see the buildings through the viewfinder.
This is what I had in mind and successfully did. I’ve been thinking about doing panoramic photography for a long time and this was a chance to buy that nice panoramic head for one of my tripods and experiment with stitching.
Many wide angle lenses are affected by distortion that causes lines to balloon out in the center of the frame and converge near the edges; the client did not want their building to look like it was leaning over. To solve this problem Paul carefully chose his vantage point and shot a series of frames that were later stitched together in Photoshop. He set himself up on the rooftop of another building half the height of his subject and proceeded to photograph the building in pieces. The end result has definitive vanishing points, straight lines, and looks fantastic.