Alley in Seattle. You have to wonder what happens to this city when an earthquake hits. Photoshopped. Click to embiggen.
Alley in Seattle. You have to wonder what happens to this city when an earthquake hits. Photoshopped. Click to embiggen.
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pancake lens?
It fall down. Go boom. It’s just a matter of time. The only thing I have to worry about is tornadoes … well, not really, I don’t live in a trailer park. I have lived in the mid-west all my life and the only place I have seen a tornado is television.
If you get caught in a quake downtown. It’s 50/50 weather you are going home that day.
Photoshopped?
$ exiftool seattle2010.jpg
Make: OLYMPUS IMAGING CORP.
Camera Model Name: E-520
Focal Length: 33.0 mm (35 mm equivalent: 66.0 mm)
Exposure Time: 1/80
F Number: 5.0
ISO: 100
Flash: Auto, Did not fire
Lens: OLYMPUS 14-45mm Lens
Date/Time Original: 2010:04:12 13:29:52
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows
Framing: Crooked As Usual (Adobe Photoshop notwithstanding)
Oh… enhanced.
“You have to wonder what happens to this city when an earthquake hits.”
Millions of dollars of instant improvements.
#5..crooked? This time I leveled it based on multiple reference points. With all those walls bending every which way and a crooked alley…I’d like to see you do better. The original is there for you to play with.
@8 Sorry, John, but that is definitely something that you (and most amateur photographers) need to work on. The only thing that looks straight to me in that picture is the man, and people are a bad reference for decrooking pictures. Short of the horizon, the ocean, or any body of water, walls are usually the next best thing. Most of the walls/buildings are leaning to the left here. Look at that building with big glassy windows in the background, place a ruler against that white-ish column, it’s obviously crooked.
The two walls closer to the camera don’t look quite as crooked, but they do look warped. Many lenses do that, my camera does that all the time. I usually give the zoom lever a twitch to apply a little bit of zoom and lose the typical warping of the minimum focal length. I lose a little bit of width, but I also get rid of the warping. Warping disguises crookedness.
Unless, of course, those buildings are in fact crooked. My home town has plenty of beachfront crooked buildings. Are they? Are all those buildings in your picture actually crooked?
The ground underneath the buildings will turn into quicksand probably similar to the early 20th century Great San Francisco earthquake.
Example: Fill a jar half way with water. Pour sand into the jar until top of sand looks solid. Place jar on the hood of a car. Pound fists near the jar to simulate an earthquake. The water will rise up through the soil and “drown” any structures there.
#9–Luc==you say: “The only thing that looks straight to me in that picture is the man, and people are a bad reference for decrooking pictures.” /// So, you claim the man is actually walking off perpendicular? I put a weighted string across my perpendicular screen and found most of the buildings to be on the vertical while some were off.
I believe its as good as could be achieved with normal equipment.
Your advice while generally true, doesn’t apply here.
Why worry? It’s not like there’s a volcano next to it.
Oh wait.
Bobbo, the man is walking. Our vertical axis swings when we walk. Besides, he seems to be walking on slope-like ground. And he’s carrying some weight on one of his shoulders, that is likely to affect his posture, now this way then the other way.
I tried to fix the picture using the big, modern buildiing in the background as the main reference. Since it’s modern, I consider it more reliable than the others.
It works fairly well, all the walls on the right half of the picture seem to agree. The whole picture “feels” better. But then the building in the middle gets crooked, and definitely the walls on the left look crooked/warped. I think the lens is causing distortions in John’s picture.
Look at me making the same mistake. I put too much emphasis on the walls on the left, so the city in the horizon turned out crooked. If I had leveled the picture based on the horizon, the big wall on the left would be leaning too much to the right. But it’s not leaning, it’s warped. I wasn’t careful about the focal length, so the lens distorted the image.
Luv alleyways. This one is especially grimy and worn. I can smell it.
Seattle is not near or on any active faults… its not San Francisco.. why all the scare mongering?
Sure there might be a 2.1M quake every 100 years.. but that ain’t gonna shake anything.
Forget Seattle! how about San Francisco? There are plenty of structures just like these in SF still! Just don’t park next to a brick wall with a large masonry overhang at the top of the building!
Remember to walk down the center of the alley!
Is the metadata available if I were to look at this in Lightroom, for example?
Nevermind. I see the answer is yes.
#13–Luc==thanks for the extra work. In the OP, that modern building is also on the vertical==do you agree?
So, using a range of standard lenses, taking close ups of tall buildings will introduce a lens convergence that unavoidably will cause the left and right tall subjects to “bend in.” Straighten one side out, and the other side will go off vertical the opposite direction. Playing with the zoom setting can minimize this distortion but then you wind up not having the picture (subject matter, framing, or composition) that you wanted.
I liked your own picture, and isn’t that the primary thing?
#19–I see you post of social issues in the same manner that Alfie posts on political matters.
You should be warned and banned in like manner.
The interesting thing about the picture is the pseudo-cylindrical corner on the antique building. It may look cornball now but it was avant-garde for its time, with curved steel I-beams holding it up. The blue facade on it looks like cast iron. (They don’t build ’em like that no mo’.)
The lens’s unfortunate pincushioning effect on tall vertical walls shot through an alley is irrelevant.
Same with yesterday’s San Francisco photo. The two cylindrical features & their copper cladding were intriguing.
Ol’ JCD probably knows more about your technical gripes than you do.
Old buildings held in relief to new architecture, churches and alleys (or hallways) are a reoccurring theme in this photographic artists catalog. Humans as subjects are in general absent or avoided. “”Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within”, wrote Claudia Johnson.
Many people resent being photographed especially by strangers.
whoa thats an awesome pic.
The only straight lines in a picture will run through the exact center of the photo. (If it hasn’t been cropped.) Fish-eye just becomes less noticeable it doesn’t go away. Things get more complicated when the “film” plane is not plumb.
A more pressing question is did the lady seated in the third floor window sign a release?
Instant Urban Renewal.
When and where I grew up it used to be done slowly with arson and then bulldozers.
But this way works too. If you get a 6.0 in Seattle it should be able to collapse 60% of the old city construction and damage most of the rest structurally beyond redemption.
Then the west of the country can look forward to living like they do in N’Orleenz, except for being wet all the time.
And before the mid-west gets all smug, there have been some truly impressive earth quakes out there, like in New Madrid in 1810.
#2: Improbus, since you live in the Midwest, there’s a fair chance that you *will* be affected by a tornado at some point. Pay attention to bad weather in that area.
When I was 9 years old, a small tornado jumped over our house with no damage except to a lamppost in front of our house. On the other hand, a garage under construction in a nearby housing development was turned into toothpicks by the same tornado. Luck of the draw…
One of my first jobs was to retrofit buildings in Seattle’s Pioneer Square for earthquakes. (where this photo was taken.)
The brick and mortar in some of those old building can literally be pushed over with your hands or a tap with a sledge hammer (I’ve done it myself.)
So, they use reinforced concrete, cables and plywood to add structure to the buildings.
I’m sure it helps but I still wouldn’t want to be in a one of those old buildings if The Big One hit.
>> Santa Maria said, on August 21st, 2010 at 12:32 pm
>> Seattle is not near or on any active faults… its not San Francisco.. why all the scare mongering?
There is a fault called the “Seattle Fault”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Fault
I don’t know how it compares to any in San Francisco but they got a pretty good hit in 1965.
As for the photoshop discussion — why don’t cameras digitally sign photos? Wouldn’t that be pretty easy to put in the tag? It sure would solve a lot of debates.