Oh don't get me wrong - I LOVE wide angle shots!

There are TONS of amazing city landscapes where buildings are converging upwards (from low angle shots) to outwards (from helicopter, or higher building vantage points) - and we've all seen extroardinary nature landscape shots with wide angle lenses.

Not knocking them - above I was going over versions of correcting the distortion if you wanted to even out "people" shots - from just a little bit of tucking-in to considerable perspective correction issues.

Examples of use:

1 - You shot some architecture images for a client - they see them and get a funny look on their face (which actually isn't funny - it's nerve-wracking) and tell you they were looking for the kind of images where all the vertical lines were, well... Vertical. NOW you know a quick way in Photoshop to "correct" that (NOT using the Perspective Transform). There's nothing actually "wrong" with the first image - it's just not what they were looking for.

2 - You shot a wedding - periodically with an extreme wide angle lens. You took a group shot of the WHOLE family - but from up close and with a very wide angle lens (let's just say it was a tiny room you were in and it was raining outside - nothing you could control - in a perfect situation, you could step much further back and zoom in to a longer focal length). Grandpa and Grandma's faces are stretching out to the corners of the frame - while it won't be perfect, you now know how to correct for this - AND you know to shoot in a way the position everyone to be clearly seen BEFORE you take the picture (as in the above pictures - everything was lost that was in the bottom corners).

I'm not knocking them (wide angle lenses and shots from them) - just looking at them from a technical and "on the job use" POV since this thread started out as a technical observation and clarification of wide angle lenses - and the use of the word "distortion" - whereas your lens and the shot above is NOT in fact distorted, but a natural set of converging lines from a wide angle lens using a down-angled perspective.

Did that make sense?

Hope this helps-
-Lew ;-)