Tall building, tips on improving next time?

I'm concerned about the distortion. Shot loosely with the 17-40 on a 5D2 and manually adjusted the vertical distortion in LR5.

Is there room for improvement? The building and lamps still have a slight inward lean. I'm sure to the average eye the photograph works fine, but I'm concerned.

Any tips on improving this shot at next attempt? Perhaps shoot multiple over lapping 50mm shots and stitching? If so, shoot horizontal or vertical? I'm as far back as I can get and really no options to getting up higher either.

This is a 3 exposure HDR of the St. John Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia.

Thank you for any feedback.

It is a pretty good shot, but I feel this type of subject would work better (more dramatic) if shot directly head on. Sometimes, when shot head on, the distortion actually helps accentuate the drama.

The distortion combined with the non-horizontal horizon kill this one. Sorry.

my take.

1) in photoshop, select all, command-t (transform), hold down command button and the cursor allows you to do a free transform on the corners. if you're on windows substitute alt for command, i think.

2) histogram in curves shows very few highlights so i pumped them up along with the rest of the image

I don't like going all the way vertical on shots like this, in fact i might have taken it a little too far especial on the right side. set guides first to help judge where you want to be.

The front of the building seems a bit mottled, did you dodge/burn on any of it?


edit: actually, looking a little closer, I shouldn't have adjusted the bottom right corner. The angle of the curb should be slightly tilted upward going to the right to show the persecutive of the camera being to the left of the church.

Not trying to be a curmudgeon here, but I don't care for the HDR tone mapping either: the whites are muddy —tone reversal: an unpleasant result of local tone mapping operator algorithms; even with the adjustment in PS they still look muddy. Using the Compressor or even Exposure Fusion in Photomatix would render a more natural result.

As to the distortion, there's only so far one can go in post before the righting of lines starts clashing with other perspective clues. With the lens that was used, a better approach is to stand farther away from the building and then crop (roughly half the image, yes) in post processing. There'd probably still be a small amount of distortion, but it'd be easily corrected digitally.

Thanks for all the feedback

I do not have PS. I'm going to rework this photo and reshoot it from straight on since it is less then a 5 minute walk from my home Unfortunately distance is limited as their are buildings across the street.

Thanks again!!

JJD.Photo: you might want to read this through, it might help a bit.