If you’re interested in architectural photography, this one small adjustment is crucial

I’m talking about the one thing that it’s very difficult to avoid when taking pictures in any urban environment, and that’s tilting the camera. Even the smallest tilt can make the most careful architectural study look like a snapshot. It’s the tiniest of details but one of the most important, in my opinion, for this kind of photography.

Tilt can come from two things. You can have horizontal tilt from not holding the camera level, but that’s just a bit of sloppy technique that’s easily fixed in your editor. But then there’s vertical tilt, where you have to tilt the camera upwards to get the full height of a building in the frame.

You could use a shift lens to keep the camera level and get everything in the shot, but there are expensive and tricky to use. You could get further back or use a wide-angle lens and accept that your subject will occupy only the top part of the frame so that you then have to crop off the base of the image or find some meaningful foreground detail. The first option isn’t ideal and the second can be difficult. Sometimes you can’t do either.

So very often, your architectural shots will have some kind of tilt or convergence. It may not be much, and you may think it’s hardly worth fixing, but honestly, even a degree here and there looks like sloppiness and will devalue the result.

We’re lucky that most photo editors offer some kind of perspective correction, often with an automatic ‘verticals’ correction. You should definitely, definitely use it, even if you think it’s only made a small change.

Here’s an example I shot recently. It’s part of a series I’m calling ‘Norwegian Vernacular’ and the strange juxtaposition of traditional wooden housing alongside modern concrete constructions. A bit specialised, I know, and probably not of interest to everyone (!) but we’re all different, right? For this I was strongly influenced by Gabriele Basilico’s book ‘Berlin’, which is a kind of precise, deadpan study of the architecture of Berlin in a series of black and white images, all captured with exact architectural precision.

So maybe you can see the difference that these minor perspective corrections make. Here’s the original RAW file in Capture One, and you can see that there is a small vertical skew, but it weakens the image considerably.

Here’s the finished, corrected shot. The black and white treatment helps establish it as a kind of technical study rather than just a travel shot, but the straightened verticals are absolutely essential to the effect.

Sadly, I don’t think I’m ever likely to meet Signor Basilico, but I hope he would approve.