Ultra-wide shift lens - but compact

[Colin O]

Sometimes 20mm - my widest focal length - isn't wide enough. I've noticed it most recently when photographing inside churches and cathedrals. (These are vacation photos.) I've been considering the Voigtlander 15/4.5 Super Wide Heliar III - high-quality but also nice and compact so it doesn't take up much size/weight in the camera bag - but another lens that's long been on my wishlist is a shift lens. I would enjoy playing around with correcting perspectives in-camera - and a compact shift lens could make the Voigtlander redundant. There's an 18mm shift lens (with fixed f/8 aperture) available from AstrHori - a new Chinese company. It's super cheap and correspondingly, gets bad reviews! But one interesting aspect to it is its simplicity and super compact size. (It's really an APS-C lens, though marketed as full-frame - it only covers full-frame when not shifted - the shift results in heavy vignetting on full-frame.)

I wonder though why another company doesn't make a better attempt at this. I know that perspective can be pretty effectively corrected in post, but still, I just think that a compact ultra-wide shift lens (even with a fixed aperture) could be an interesting option. Maybe not for pros, but there are plenty of curious amateurs who might be willing to give it a try - even at a much higher price than the AstrHori.

Edited October 5 by Colin O

[AJG]

Shift lenses have never been cheap, and I suspect that they would be even more difficult to design for digital cameras. For most photographers shooting a number of images and putting them together in Photoshop or other programs is probably a higher quality solution and will certainly cost less.  Having done a lot of this with 4x5 when I only shot film, I know that lenses with a lot of covering power were always pricey.  Using a shift lens effectively really requires a good tripod for best results, so it isn't just another single purpose lens that you would have to take with you but a decent tripod as well.  I can't see a viable market here although I could certainly be wrong.

[Sandy Vongries]

Not your brand, film days, but I have a shift lens I haven't used in years except for fun / experiment. I have had considerable success with stitched, multi exposure panoramas.  I will have to try that technique indoors.  In film days, visiting and shooting a considerable number of famous cathedrals in the UK, my 24mm did rather well.

[rodeo_joe1]

On 10/5/2024 at 10:45 PM, Colin O said:

I wonder though why another company doesn't make a better attempt at this.

Because it would be very expensive, and the market just isn't there to justify the R&D costs. 

There's also the issue of colour-fringing that occurs when using a shift-lens with Bayer-pattern digital sensors. The Micro-lens overlay of a digital sensor is designed to deal with a central and perpendicular optical axis, and that carefully designed geometry goes completely "to pot" when the optical axis is shifted. 

Here's an example I took and posted ages ago. The lens was only a 35mm P-C Nikkor, and the issue gets worse with wider lenses and more shift. I have a 28mm P-C Nikkor too, and rarely use it because of the fringing issue. It can be fixed in post with some software (Capture One seems to work well) but overall it's a pain, and simply shooting wider and correcting the keystoning in post generally works just as well, or better. 

The above pics show the colour-fringing issue. 

You can also see that the lens rise effectively narrows the angle-of-view at the top of the image. Which kind of defeats the object of using an ultra-wide lens. 

Edited October 19 by rodeo_joe1

[Colin O]

Very interesting, thanks