Today I thought I was losing my mind because there was no way I could reconcile what I was seeing and what I remembered seeing.

While on a casual cycling outing with my camera in tow, I came across Thunderbird Stadium. There was a small open entrance so I went inside to get cooler water from a fountain (they always have one) and eventually ended up on the pitch to sightsee. I shot some snaps, hopped back on my bike and kept it moving.

When I got home and imported the photos, I thought my brain was playing tricks on me because the roof looked so distorted, something I do not remember observing. In my mind, the culprit was the very wide Fujifilm GF 20-35mm f/4 R WR which I know to cause mild barrel distortion at the wide end, however never this extreme, so imagine how confused I was.

What also did not add up was that the roof sat in the upper third of the frame rather than near the edges, where any lens distortion would be at its strongest. I tried to correct the perspective in Lightroom Classic in vain. I then went over to Capture One and it was no better. I went on Google and YouTube to look for answers and none were satisfactory.

Finally I had the bright idea to look up the stadium and read about it, and it turned out all the images of it were the same. There was no way all of us could face the same issue.

After reading up about the architecture on its Wikipedia page as well as here and there, I learned that Thunderbird Stadium, which was built in 1967 by a former student, has a suspended roof hence its catenary curve, so I was indeed not crazy and nothing was wrong with the image.

So the Fujifilm GF ultra wide-angle zoom lens was largely innocent.

I probably did not notice when I was on the field taking the photo, which is odd because that is the first thing that would have jumped at me.

We live… We learn…