Modern camera lenses are really good. In fact, the engineers have done pretty much everything they can to engineer characteristics like distortion out of the glass. But if you’re still worried about it, then there’s a simple trick that you can do to eliminate it. Believe it or not, if you just change your aspect ratio and shoot square instead of in wider format, you virtually eliminate most of the problems.
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The center of a lens is where it’s typically the sharpest, and that’s also the case with distortion being minimized too. So if you’re using a wider lens and only shoot based on what’s in the center of the frame, you eliminate a lot of the problem. Of course, there’s optical distortion where you get up close to a subject and make it happen if it’s a wider focal length. But for the most part, you’re not going to see it very much anymore.
So keep these things in mind:
- The longer the focal length, the closer you can get to your subject
- The wider the focal length, the more room you’ll need between you and the subject to minimize distortion
- Shoot square, if you do this, you’re bound to not even see it with wider angle shots
This works really well if you’ve got an older lens and don’t want to upgrade at all. It also works simply based on composition. It becomes much easier because you’re always just going to put everything more or less in the center.