Zooming in to a selection of vertices with the period key does not work as expected I am following through the exercises in BlenderBasics_4thEdition2011.pdf and have gotten to the section on texturing.  The book goes through the creation of a Lighthouse and now I am texturing it.  I want to have a closeup view of the roof of the lighthouse after partitioning it as the lesson describes on page 54.  

In order to get a close up view I selected the roof and want to center the screen on the vertices of it so I pressed the Numpad . key.  When I do that the view zooms so that the roof is off the screen.  

What am I am doing wrong?



I tried Ray's answer and was able to move the origin but pressing the Numpad . key still did not work.  The centering was still on the bottom of the lighthouse, as if the origin was still there.
It looks like you accidentally locked the view to an object or to the 3d cursor.

To unlock the view from object:


Press the N hotkey to open the properties panel on the right of the 3D view.
In the View section remove the object in the Lock to Object setting. If it is active, the Object name to which the view is locked will be listed in that field.
Click the X to the right of the object name to remove it.


To unlock the view from cursor:


Same as above, open the properties panel scroll down to the View section.
Uncheck the option "Lock to Cursor".


After unlocking the view, zooming to selection should work as expected.

In the image bellow you can see the correct settings for zooming to start working as expected.