You will see many really good photographers  shoot buildings from a low position creating a distortion called keystoning. This is sometimes desirable for a dramatic effect but I believe it is used far to often.  I will show you an example of this effect and how to eliminate it if you wish, using Photoshop.

Trey Ratcliff of “Stuck In Customs” is a great photographer. Far, far better than I but in this example I felt what I did with his image in Photoshop is more appealing, to my eye. I think Trey was shooting from this very low angle to reduce the amount of the pavement and maximize the amount of the dramatic sky. He was using a very wide 14mm lens. The combination of the wide-angle lens and the tilt of the camera contributed to this exaggerated effect. If you shoot a photo like this and you want it to have a more standard look here’s how you fix it.

[I have the original Photoshop CS so I know at least this version and the versions after that can do this.]

Open the photo in Photoshop. Click “View” and “New Guide”. Guides are just there to help you get your image straight. Create as many guides as you need. I used two for this photo. Drag them to where you need them. Do a “Control A” to select the image. Select the “Move Tool” from the pallet. Click “Edit” and then go to “Transform” and “Skew”. Click the corners and drag out to make alignment adjustments. After you align photo you may have to make other “Transform” adjustments. In this case I did “Free Transform” to make the building taller because the “Skew” adjustment made the church look squat.

I felt too much attention was given to the sky and not much to the church so not only did I straighten it out but I enhanced the definition to the art on the church by adding some contrast using the curves tool. I think that sometime HDR photos seem a little flat.

In my version of Trey’s photo the dramatic clouds are still there but there is a lot more attention to the building. The sides are vertical and the frescos on the building are brighter and show more detail.

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This poor lady came to my computer users group with a external harddrive that was not functioning. I took a look at it. When I plugged it in to the power it started click loudly. I plugged it in my laptop and it saw there was a drive but it could not be accessed. It just started clicking more. This was not a good sign. I asked her “You still have the files on your computer right?” She said, “No someone at the PC Users Group told her to backup to the external harddrive.” I told her, “Backing up is when you still have the original file but you also copied the file to some other medium for long term storage.” I did not have the tools to completely check the drive but I was almost sure it was dead. As it turns out there were photos of her deceased  husband on it that did not exist anywhere else.

Read posts on backing up.

Here’s a picture of the most realistic one yet.

Google does not check your POP account frequently so you may have your Gmail open but your not seeing all of you messages because they’re still on the server. You can go to “Settings”,  “Accounts and Import”, go down to “Check mail using POP3″ and click on “Check mail now”. This will import any new messages.

This method is very inconvenient. A better way is to turn on this new feature that checks your POP accounts whenever you click the “Refresh link” just above your messages.

At the top of the Gmail page click “Settings” and “Labs”. Find “Refresh POP accounts” and enable it. Now you can check your POP accounts with ease.