
Although overusing this look can be a bit tedious, it was very trendy a few years back in the wedding photography world with photographers chasing a standard focal length with tilt and shift options. But I was still at f/5.6, so the image was tack sharp where it is needed, and I didn’t have to remove my big studio lights to bring in something smaller allowing me to use a standard lens at f/1.4, although even at this setting, I still would not have had the same aesthetic. This uses the lens in the opposite way that it is designed to be used, allowing me to focus on just the eyes while the forehead and chin melt away into the out of focus area. It gives a real 80s and 90s vibe from back in the day when photographers were still using technical cameras. The shot below I took at a recent portrait sitting. It negates the need to do focus stacking in almost all instances and allows for a faster workflow without any loss in image quality. I use these lenses for almost all product photography, especially when the products get small. Lenses don’t generally work very well at f/22, but at f/5.6, with a carefully applied lens tilt you can create an amazing depth of field while hanging on to the amazing lens optics. This is of particular interest to anyone into landscapes, still life, or architecture photography. This is oversimplifying it, but go have a read and find out what you have been missing out on for all these years. Being able to increase or decrease your depth of field at a given aperture by changing the plane of focus is a valuable asset. The Scheimpflug principle is something that every photographer should familiarize themselves with. You Are Short of Light but Need a Big Depth of Field Obviously, you can’t use it in every situation, but even with people in shot, there are workarounds to get it to work. It gives a medium format depth as well as offering a higher resolution for your final image. Yes, you can make a panoramic with other tools, but this method is utterly brilliant. I needed more pixels, but my bank balance didn’t allow for medium format. This was the original reason that I purchased the lens. Over the years, they have been a permanent feature in my camera bag, and I have often rented more niche focal lengths to achieve the images I wanted but previously could not achieve. Suddenly, all of my previous confusions had vanished, and I had found the purpose for these brilliant lenses. A tilt-shift lens was the tool for the job. I also didn’t own loads of 3,000-watt lights, so I needed to achieve a great depth of field at about f/8. So, I decided to rent a tilt-shift lens and make a panoramic. If I rented a Phase One there would be no way that I would make any real money from the job. I had no idea what was going on, and I felt pretty defeated.įast-forward about five years and I had a booking to shoot a billboard campaign on a pretty tight budget. That weekend, I managed to achieve absolutely nothing.
#Tiltshift images manual
I quickly upgraded the ground glass to a manual focus one thanks to a speedy online delivery and went about testing it. First off, it has no autofocus, which is fine in 2019, but back then in a pre-live view world, focusing a tilt-shift lens with a standard DSLR focus screen was a nightmare. The lens arrived all shiny and new, and I quickly attached it to my Canon 5D (the original one) and set about playing.

I then found a rental store and rented a Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift Lens for the weekend. So I headed home, opened up the Google, and began to learn about the Scheimpflug principle. Thankfully, the photographer was a nice guy and he set about explaining how cameras hadn’t always only focused forward and backwards and that he liked to be able to have a few more movements to mimic what he had when he shot large format. Not being too proud to ask, I ambled over and inquired about this contraption. I was at the early stage in my photography where your confidence far outweighs your abilities and I thought I knew everything, yet I hadn’t seen this before. Way back in about 2010, I bumped into a photographer with a wonky-looking lens.
