Folks, I have both enjoyed and learnt a lot from the postings on perspective correction. I have moved from Nikon SLRs to a Nikon digital and it is FANTASTIC to use. However, I had not explored the perspective correction. Looks like it is time to get adventurous.
One consideration is cost. I forget what my SLRs cost, but I would guess the body was about $AUD1000 (i.e. about $US500), the micro-Nikkor 55 mm lens about the same. BTW: if you are buying a new camera, and thinking of a Nikon, forget the rather useless standard 50 mm lens, and go for the micro 55 mm. It has macro as well as normal range. Beautiful tool. The newer macro zooms are even better. My Nikon Coolpix (stupid name) 990 cost me about $US1000. I got Adobe Photoshop Limited Edition free of charge with the camera. I am not sure what is missing from the Photoshop LE, but it seems pretty complete. The 990 has 3.4 million pixels, so the resolution is amazing. Also, the images are just so much easier to store and label on a CD than as slides! For many years I lusted after the perspective correction PC Nikkor lens mentioned by Thierry. Problem was cost! Even today, I would guess that I could buy a digital for not much more than the PC lens. The real issue with the PC lens is that it is so specialised. A lot of money for a lens I would only use every 500 or so photos. I agree with the suggestion of photographing / imaging a grid and then correcting the perspective. And of course, with the digital, you can do this, download to a computer, do the correction, and see the results immediately. If you also use a computer notebook in the field, then you can do all of this on the site, get all the images, do the perspective corrections, and be down to the pub in time for a beer before lunch / with lunch, knowing that you have the best image. Even though I love the new technology, I still marvel at the analogue computers used to solve three dimensional astronomical problems, designed and built centuries ago. Yep, sundials. Cheers, John "Far better an approximate answer to the right question which may be difficult to frame, than an exact answer to the wrong question which is always easy to ask" John W Tukey, statistician
