Hi guys,

I have a Sony 16-105 f3.5-5.6 lens and was out the other day and tonight taking skyline photos across the ocean.. however I have noticed that the pictures are seriously distorted towards the right hand corner of the frame. - the horizon takes a dip on the right hand edge of about 3mm when you look at the photo on screen. I hadn't noticed this before and only did when viewing the horizon.

I've had the lens just short of 2 years. I don't think or do not remember giving it a bump or anything untoward...

Is this a fixable phenomenon with a service or have I buggered it?...

:o( hmmm not happy!

regards
Dean

I'll upload some images later this afternoon showing exactly what I mean, (can't at the moment) and post a link here so you can see what I mean.

thanks for being patient

Thank you for waiting. I have uploaded 4 photos to flickr that show what I mean.

the three sea/horizon shots I put in photoshop and just added a straight line where the horizon 'should' be. as you can see - the image deviates quite significantly on the right hand side only.

don't know what happened to the URL...

http://picasaweb.google.com/dean.mullin/TempImages#

It looks strange indeed.

I would suggest taking a large sheet of paper draw a grid with lines on it. Mark the center and take pics (with different zoom settings) with the center exactly in the middle. Make sure the paper and back of the camera are parallel. If you get strange asymetric distortions I guess something is wrong with the lens

Was the camera level when the images were taken? If the camera is slightly off level, The horizon can be out and if the ca,mera is pointed down at the front yur image will bend along a horizon. The house image looks like a different problem to me, could be lens distortion. All of this is fixable in photoshot or similar software.

Dougie

Its a normal distortion for such lens! Your lens is OK! Lenses with such focal range have this equal which you use. Canon, Nikon and and and....:-)

Read please also here:

http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/sony_16-105_3p5-5p6_m15/

http://a.img-dpreview.com/lensreviews/images/160mmequiv.jpg

If you look at the panel picture you can see the effect to a greater or lesser extent in all four corners, something referred to as 'pincushioning', one of the shortcomings of a cheap lens.

Yeah, what he said! I had the exact reaction. PS has a built-in lens correction filter under the distortion category that works pretty darn well for this. I think the ocean shots are just tilted down on the right. If you straightened them based on the center of the image you would probably find that they seem to run downhill on both bottom corners.