In the field this is a bit fiddly, so maybe you want to get some help from this resource to make better use of it. By doing so you may be able to get better image quality by using an aperture like f/11 in combination with a slight amount of tilt instead of stopping the lens down to f/22 and running into diffraction or avoid focus stacking. By tilting the lens a bit you can extend the plane of things in focus. This is the classic usage scenario for tilt in landscape, architecture or table top photography. So I will focus on additional topics and usage scenarios not covered there in detail yet. There is a very comprehensive and helpful discussion of tilt to be found here. By tilting the front part of the lens you can modify the plane of sharpness. Tilt is a bit harder to master then shift if you want to make full use of it. This is much easier with a shift lens as you will have the correct framing from the start. To realise this when using a non-shift wide lens like a 17mm you will have to tilt the camera up when taking the shot to have the person at the bottom and later tilt the image down in post to correct for the converging verticals so you will end up with much less pixels and a very different framing. With these kind of shots you usually want to have the person close to the edge of the frame and you also want to avoid converging verticals. Example 3: Environmental Portraiture Sony A7rII | Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L | shifted up Sony A7rII | Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L | f/4.0 | shifted upĮnvironmental portraiture is another application I personally like to use wide shift lenses for. When using a full frame camera you can easily realize a 48x36mm (4×3, 3 shots with 50% overlap) or 60x24mm (2.5×1, 2 shots with 33% overlap) framing which – compared to cropping an image from a wider lens – will give you an increased number of pixels and better image quality. Example 2: Shift Panorama Sony A7rII | Laowa 12mm 2.8 Zero-D on Magic Shift Converter | landscape orientation horizontal shift pano Sony A7rII | Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L | f/11 | landscape orientation vertical shift panoĪ “shift panorama” is a very simple panorama as you don’t need any accessories like a rotating plate and you won’t be running into stitching errors (for wider lenses you may need a rear shift adapter to completely eliminate stitching errors though). This is the application people will most likely associate with shift lenses and it probably does not need any further explanation. Example 1: Correcting converging verticals Sony A7rII | Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L | shifted up Sony A7rII | Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L | shifted up To give an example: in case of the Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L you need about a 10.8mm non-shift lens to fully replicate it (and you will end up with significantly less pixels as you have to crop some parts of the 10.8mm image). Sony A7rII | Zeiss Loxia 21mm 2.8 | f/8.0 | converging verticals corrected in post So to get the same framing you need a wider non-shift lens compared to the shift lens. Nevertheless there is a significant benefit of using a shift lens: you will still have information in the corners which otherwise is lost when tilting in post. While many people think a shift lens will show less perspective distortion this is not the case. A shift lens or a tilted image in post will both show the same perspective distortion when taken from the same spot with the same focal length This effect can nowadays be replicated by tilting the image in post. Sony A7rII | Canon TS-E 17mm 4.0L via Sigma MC-11 | f/11 With the Shift function you are moving your camera in this bigger image circle and by doing so the horizontal line can be moved from the center of the image to the desired position. Shift lenses cover a larger image circle than necessary for 35mm (fullframe) format. With film you couldn’t easily straighten verticals in post, so these were needed if you wanted to delve into more professional architecture shooting without having to deal with a medium or large format view camera. In the analogue era we mostly had shift (without tilt) lenses from several manufacturers like Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Leica and mostly in the 28-35mm range. Example 1: Correcting converging verticals.
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