Lens

I was curious about the benefits of using a tilt shift lens. How can it change or enhance an image?

There are lots of explanations on the web, but one that has a video showing what it does is here: How a Tilt-Shift Lens Works & Creative Examples

A shift/tilt lens will give you somewhat similar movements that you would get when using a view camera.

Often we are tasked to image rectangular and square objects. Consider a tall building. You and your camera are at street level. Because you are close, you must point your camera upwards to encompass the entire structure. The results will be an image of the building that converges at the top. This convergence contributes to the illusion of height but --- often in architectural photography, the requirement is an image that depicts a faultless rectangle. If we shoot from the middle floor of an adjacent building, our image shows converges at both top and bottom. Swing and tilt camera to the rescue.

 

Another example, we are hired to shoot an ad for a breakfast cereal. The box is rectangular. Your view shows a perfect rectangle. To achieve you position the camera square with the box. The resulting image shows the box face but no sides or top (unsatisfactory). You shift the camera position to show the box face and top and side. Sorry to report, the box front will image as a parallelogram. Swings and tilts to the rescue. We use a camera position that images front, top and side. We correct the skewed image with swings and tilts.

 

Professionals, who did this stuff for a living using film, used large format view cameras that featured excessive swings and tilts. Largely the film is held parallel to the object and the lens, free to move about and is positioned independently for best composition. Digital cameras with tilt lenses fall short of what a view camera can do

Here's a link to Nikon's 24mm Tilt/shift lens manual.

 

If you scroll to page 207 onwards, there are some good example diagrams and pictures that illustrate a variety of uses of such a lens.

 

You might also want to research the Scheimpflug principle.

I have a 90mm T/S Lens (used on 135 Format aka "Full Frame" Camera). (Canon DSLRs)

 

I bought this lens specifically for Portraiture, so that I could skew and make an artificial Depth of Field: doing so is time consuming and one requires a patient Subject.

 

From my many discussions, this particular use of a T/S lens is unusual: more commonly T/S lenses are used for Architectural, Table-top and similar genres of Photography, and usually where the Subject is inanimate.

 

WW

also see a personal perspective (so to speak) at

Perspective Control Lenses since 1971 and counting

Another common use for the longer focal length (ca. 80-90mm) tilt lenses was in the field of "product" photography. This is like the moderator's use, but for things like rows of items, etc.

Not to derail this thread too severely but lately I've been made aware of the Fuji GX680 which has (apparently) some tilt/shift capabilities. Wondering if it's a true tilt/shift in the same sense as a view camera or if it's some sort of reimagined or re-engineered version of tilt/shift, similar to a modern tilt/shift lens for a DSLR?

Not to derail this thread too severely but lately I've been made aware of the Fuji GX680 which has (apparently) some tilt/shift capabilities. Wondering if it's a true tilt/shift in the same sense as a view camera or if it's some sort of reimagined or re-engineered version of tilt/shift, similar to a modern tilt/shift lens for a DSLR?

I haven't used the Fuji GX 680, but I think it only has front movements. When I shot a lot of 4x5 I mostly used back movements for perspective and DOF control and have never lusted after a tilt/shift lens since I much preferred back movements. With front tilt/swing you quickly find out if your lens has enough covering power and you also get a good demonstration of the law of cosines and its effect on exposure at the edges of the negative. For rise/fall/shift, which I rarely used a lot of, front movements and back movements have equivalent effects on the final image.

They are used to manage, minimize or distort perspective. Also, the focal plane (area in focus) can be manipulated by tilting it top to bottom or right to left, for some interesting selective focus effects. This is difficult to mimic in Photoshop.

Tilt-shift lenses (for 35mm cameras) will help you obtain tremendous Depth Of Field without closing down the lens aperture too much, avoiding image degradation from diffraction. This effect is based on the Sheimpflug principle, which view camera users easily exploit.

Tilt-shift lenses (for 35mm cameras) will help you obtain tremendous Depth Of Field without closing down the lens aperture too much, avoiding image degradation from diffraction. This effect is based on the Sheimpflug principle, which view camera users easily exploit.

They do not (!) create any more depth of field than other lenses. They, as Bob said, allow repositioning the plane of focus.

. . . as Bob said, [Tilt Shift Lenses] allow repositioning the plane of focus.

 

One of the simplest explanations I have found is at Cambridge In Colour - my bold now for emphasis -

 

"Tilt movements enable the photographer to tilt the plane of sharpest focus so that it no longer lies perpendicular to the lens axis. This produces a wedge-shaped depth of field whose width increases farther from the camera. The tilt effect therefore does not necessarily increase depth of field—it just allows the photographer to customize its location to better suit their subject matter."

 

REF: op cit - LINK

 

WW

I guess what is being said is, when using the the Scheimpflug principle by tilting the front standard and lens down on a view camera you are increasing the range of focus but not the depth of field. Other than that it is getting too complicated for me.

I recently posted an example of the use of the swing* front in this thread.

 

* Swing indicates a rotation about the vertical axis, while tilt indicates a rotation about the horizontal. They can obviously be combined by rotating the axis off orthogonal, or combining tilt with swing if the camera offers both types of movement.

Just for future reference, using a digital camera, one can shift and stitch images of non-moving subjects together to create much larger image files at a much wider effective focal length and with no additional distortion.