Hello all.  First off, I am not a photographer and I am not trying to become one.  However I use my digital camera to capture textures to apply on the 3d models I create and sell.  My problem is if I take pictures of textures like brick walls that have very definate horizonal lines, if I get too close (to capture detail) the image comes out very fish eyed. 

My camera is a very simple point and shoot digital canon powershot A710 I.S.

Does anyone have any advice to elimanate that fish eye effect besides stand back further (which really isn't a suitable option) ?  Would there be a picture mode that would be advisable such as: portrait, landscape etc..??

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

I doubt there's much you can do to get around it in-camera... the lens is a certain shape and without changing it, you won't change the levels of distortion it offers... this is where imaging software like photoshop comes in, which in the right hands (with a bit of patience) can eliminate all but the most fierce of distortions... if you indeed have photoshop, have a play around with the lens correction filter which (in cs2 anyway) can be found under Filter/ Distort/ Lens Correction.... but make sure to purge the cache beforehand if you're running anything other than a behemoth of a machine, as it's very memory-hungry!

hope that helps ;)
Adam

Adam Edwards Photography

Adam thanks for your help.  I have CS4 and have been able to make some good improvements but all those horizontal lines cannot be smoothed out completely.  I will bring it into Illustrator and use the mesh tool to it there and play around with it.  It's better than warp in PS because you can make the mesh as dense as you want where PS only allows for a 3x3 mesh