Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Scots Monastery, Regensburg

Scots Monastery, Regensburg

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 4 Feb 2014 at 04:53:03 (UTC)

Original – Interior view of the Romanesque church of the Scots Monastery in Regensburg, Germany.

The file with some vertical perspective returned to it. The process necessitated cropping. NOTE: I uploaded this at a much lower resolution than the original and am not suggesting this version as an alternative. See comments

Reason: High EV providing good overview of the space, excellent level of detail and interesting lighting,
Articles in which this image appears: Scots Monastery, Regensburg
FP category for this image: Interiors
Creator: Richard Bartz

Support as nominator --ELEKHH^T 04:53, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Support - Solid. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:04, 25 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Support Godhulii 1985 (talk) 12:50, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Comment, as usual, my negative comment about this type of image is the same. There has been a digital adjustment on the verticals of this picture which has made them parallel. This is an over-compesation for the error caused by the camera lens. The human eye sees things in perspective. When you remove all the vertical perspective, the result is to make the upper part of the picture look as if the elements are splaying outward i.e. the columns and upper wall of this building lean out at the top. The distortion caused by the adjustment is most apparent in the capitals of the two outermost columns which have become oval.

I would like this picture very much more, and find it more useful if the sense of height and perspective was re-introduced by allowing the upper part of the image to taper inward slightly. Amandajm (talk) 08:16, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How do you know this is the case? I disagree completely that it is obvious that verticals have been corrected. It's possible that it has been digitally perspective corrected, but I strongly suspect it hasn't. And the reason why I suspect it hasn't is because the horizon is roughly in the centre of the frame. When this is the case, no correction for the verticals is required because they are already vertical. It's only when you tilt the view upwards or downwards that you introduce leaning verticals. Also, just to correct you on one additional point, even if it were corrected, it would absolutely not be compensation for an error caused by the camera lens. It is a compensation for the reality of rectilinear perspective. The camera lens has absolutely nothing to do with it, except of course that the angle of view through the lens determines the degree to which perspective is a factor, and a wide angle lens is going to result in a larger angle of view. Also, you never responded to my last attempt to discuss with you the norm of correcting vericals in architectural photography. Ensuring that vertical lines are indeed vertical is quite fundamental to this style of photography. You're entitled to dislike this sort of correction, but to crusade against it as you appear to be doing is another thing entirely. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 12:54, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Further to Diliff's points, the capitals of the two outermost columns appear unnatural when you zoom in because as this is a static photo the vanishing point does not change as it would if you would be in the church and rotate your eye. For that to occur we would need some VR photography as here. --ELEKHH^T 22:55, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Response - The "horizon" of this photo is not central between the horizontal plane of the floor, and the horizontal plane of the ceiling. It is much closer to the floor. This is because the photographer or the tripod was not half as high as the building. The "horizon" (direct line of the camera's eye) was just a little higher than the top of the front altar (with the white cloth) as you would expect, because the altar is up several steps. From this horizontal both the upper sections of columns and walls, and the lower section would slope inwards slightly. This is the way the eye sees. This perspective is what gives a sense of height and depth to objects.

In old architecture, such as this, architects took into account the visual perspective. The jutting horizontal cornices, the big round carved gilded bosses, the size of the beams, the large size of figures painted on the ceiling, the outward curves entasis on the columns, the slight upward curve of the centre of the floor and many other tricks were used which make the most of the building's natural perspective. One of the most famous examples is the Parthenon. One Wiki Commons contributor took an excellent photo that demonstrated all the curved lines of the building, and then (in typical Wiki-Commons fashion, digitally straightened the building out, thereby rendering his photo totally useless for demonstrating the very thing that makes the Parthenon one of the greatest works of architecture ever created. This obsession with mathematically parallel lines spoils a great number of otherwise excellent photos, because it robs the building in the pictures of their dynamic elements of space, volume, direction and mass. Amandajm (talk) 03:39, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you've missed my point slightly. I was not commenting on whether the camera was situated half way between the plane of the floor and the plane of the ceiling in terms of elevation, I was talking about the fact that the camera is not significantly tilted upwards or downwards, as evidenced by the fact that the plane of the horizon (you cannot see it, obviously, because it exists beyond the interior space, but you can estimate it). This is what causes verticals to tilt, not the elevation of the camera. Elevation of the camera affects other aspects of perspective but not verticals. As long as the camera remains horizontal, vertical lines stay vertical. You are right that the central point in the image is the top of the altar, which places it slightly above the camera parallel with the horizon, but this is still not an indication of perspective correction in my opinion. It could just as easily be caused by cropping the floor, which has the effect of moving the middle of the image further up, without having any effect on the tilt of verticals. And this, to me, is why this discussion on the 'evils of correcting verticals' is so silly. The human eye never sees a scene the way a photograph captures it because it never absorbs a very wide angle scene in any coherent and consistent way. We scan our eyes around, and build up a mental image comprised of different segments, aspects and details. We don't look up at a column and see it as leaning. It's only leaning relative to the other columns, but we don't see other spatially distant columns simultaneously. We perceive them in our peripheral vision, sure, but our brain doesn't process the perspective in any meaningful way in the periphery. In fact it could be argued that we don't even consciously perceive perspective at all. It's this lack of intuition that meant that it wasn't until the Renaissance that we actually discovered how to draw scenes in such a way that took perspective into account. Here's a thought experiment to prove my point. Go to a church, stand in the middle of the aisle and look straight ahead at the altar. Then slowly scan your eyes up towards the ceiling. Do the columns start progressively leaning inwards? I suggest they don't, even though our eyes have a wide enough field of view for perspective leaning to be significant. However, verticals absolutely do lean when you scan the camera upwards because the camera has a wide field of view but you are looking at the photos with an narrow angle of view that lets you see the perspective clearly with foveal vision. The preoccupation with keeping the verticals leaning, to me, seems more like a desire to keep photos looking as uncorrected photos 'normally' do (a familiarity, if you will), rather than anything to do with what the eyes see natively. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 11:40, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - See adjusted image with vertical perspective returned to it. The image immediately becomes less flat, and looks like a place in which you could walk around. Despite the fact that the image has been cropped in the process, and less ceiling is visible, the volume and height has been returned to the building. The presence of the person who is "seeing" has been put back into the image. Amandajm (talk) 04:09, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting effect you're using there, and I'm sure some will be confused by the curved columns and floor pattern. Back to your previous comment, if you look very slightly downwards than the verticals appear vertical without any magic. While I agree with you in principle that sometimes PC can spoil images, I think in this case the image gives a good sense of the spatial depth, and the chairs, steps and table give a sense of scale, including height. As Romanesque architecture is rather massive and stable, I think perspective correction does not spoil it. Ultimately any photo is just one of many possible abstractions of reality, and choosing a perspective that shows verticals appear vertical has been and remains common in architectural perspective drawing. --ELEKHH^T 06:12, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think the introduction of curvature of the horizontal lines is more of an issue than anything that was 'corrected' in the edit. Not to mention that a significant amount of the scene has been effectively cropped. It looks to me to be a simple barrel distortion effect. I'm interested to know in what situation perspective correction does spoil an image? The main thing I can think of is simply when it introduces so much distortion at the periphery that the subject looks grotesquely warped. I have been guilty of pushing it too far with some of my images, and I am the first to admit that, but as long as the angle of view is not ridiculously wide, I honestly don't feel that it spoils an image. I feel it actually returns a more accurate sense of how we perceive an interior space, because as I said above, I don't believe we perceive leaning verticals the way photographs portray. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 11:40, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think it can be distracting when the periphery attracts undue attention. It sometimes happens with tall buildings and tight crops like this when a vertical building edge or a narrow strip of sky is close to the picture's edge, the perfectly vertical lines are reinforced by the frame, and strengthens the visual effect Amandajm is talking about that the building is perceived 'as if splaying outward'. --ELEKHH^T 23:31, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Support Per Elekhh: "Ultimately any photo is just one of many possible abstractions of reality". Too much fuss being made here and I fail to see the supposed benefits of the alternative version. -- Colin°^Talk 12:40, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Support. Agree with Colin. Regardless of the perspective correction discussion, it's clearly a quality architectural photo of the interior. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 23:12, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Schottenkirche St. Jakob Innenraum Unten.jpg --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 11:03, 4 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]