Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Cashing the Check of Fisheye

The first photo shows a realtor's use of a wide angle lens, perhaps in a vain effort to make a tiny bathroom appear bigger. Note the slight curving of straight lines near the edges of the photo. Fisheye in action, in a very minor way. Note also the distortion of the squares of the tile floor at the bottom, similar to what we get if we extend a grid too close to the viewer and pass the Station Point.

The second photo shows another example of slight fish-eye-ness in a normal wide-angle picture. Look at the curving of the line above the store name.
 Next, an audacious and impressive use of a slight upshot in a fisheye context. The dropped horizon sags justly. Though much informed by fisheye photography, this is a intuitive, freehand approach to perspective, not a technically correct one--but no worse for it. Quite the opposite. I think it's terrific.

Here's a rough for a work-in-progress on a women-in-prison project I'm calling "Women in Prison." It's a WIP WIP. OK not really--it's just a doodle I did for the blog to show the use of fisheye in an indoor setting, and to remind young women of the perils of suburban piracy.

Note that in fisheye all the perspective is forced, comic-book style. That means that apparent scale differences, like between foreground and deeper objects, such the ladies' heads, are maximized. Note as well that our view of the standing woman goes from a decisive down-view of her feet, to a unequivocal upshot of her head. Objects in fisheye are closer than they appear.

(The green projection lines running back to the DVP--not shown--bow outward, away from the center of vision, and that has the effect, I believe, of accelerating the diminution of the floor tiles.)

Here finally below, as promised, the "globe grid" used to make five-point fisheye drawings, presented both singly and in a form for doing multi thumbnails. The center point is a VP and there are VPs at 12, 3, 6, and 9.  I am not posting the globe grid for the maddeningly complex four-point perspective (Yes, four-point is more complicated than 5- , oddly.) although I will if you ask me purty-like.
JH


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