Getting the camera parallel to the building facade?

[dougpeterson]

( I have not posted for a while as I have been ill, but, last week, they got my heart to beat in Normal Sinus Rhythm, so I am now officially normal)

Glad to hear! :salute:

 

[ondebanks]

I hate to disagree with Doug or John, but wouldn't measuring the two edges of a building only guarantee that the camera is in the center? Couldn't it still be askew?

That was my exact thought also. Centering is a separate problem to parallelism or "squaring on".

The mirror method seems best. When we're aligning a telescope system and need to square on the focuser or an instrument attached to it, we use a derivative of the mirror method, such as a collimating eyepiece or laser collimator.

Building on this idea...if you wanted to be really spot-on, you could rig an adapter to hold a laser collimator along your camera's optical axis, and swivel the camera until the returning beam (reflected from the mirror on the building) landed straight back on the camera.

Ray

(Damn, I should patent that!)

 

[jlm]

or look at all the mirror solutions referred to...or use the enlarger aligner laser dot, or...

 

[wentbackward]

If you're struggling to see it, you should check the accuracy of your levels. Assuming your levels are accurate then you should see when it is correct as you look through a finder with properly marked lines or use a groundglass grid or liveview grid (or align with the edges). If you have a panning head, as you swing your camera around you should see the parallelism error and be able to locate the mid-point, even you are off-centre to the building.

It's really no harder than that (unless you have Shashin's identified problem of a building that sags or isn't straight in the first place). Practice on something square at home, or a modern building.

And don't feel bad about getting it slightly wrong occasionally, even Ansel Adams did so.