Bending Over Sideways To Please The Client - Tilt/Shift Part One

This is not a column about business relationships. It is about optics. If you want the other sort you'll have to go to Dale Carnegie or The Better Business Bureau.

Three manufacturers that I know of currently make tilt/shift lenses that can be used on digital cameras; Nikon, Canon and Samyang/Rokinon. There have been others in the past but my researches don't turn them up readily now. The one in use in the studio today is the Samyang 24mm f:3.5 version with the Nikon mount. Of course you can get it with a Canon mont as well...

Cynics may be forgiven for looking at the design and screwing up their faces, but I'm not here to judge whether or not Samyang unbolted another maker's design and reverse engineered it. Nor any I going to make the obvious comment about the use of high-grade plastics to replicate someone else's metal part. Take it from someone who used it that it is well-built and works as it should.

You don't get AF with these lenses, nor do you want it. You get MF and ADJF...Adjustable Focus.

 And you get to adjust it in ways that are at once artistic and practical.

The subjects that people cover in the studio can sometimes be challenging in that they are longer than the depth of field of a lens will cover. Stop down as much as you like, you still can't get everything in focus -and clients demand everything in focus. If you need to use a wider aperture for artistic effect, you are in even a worse fix.

Here is where the tilt mechanism of these lenses comes in. They are the way to produce the Scheimpflug effect - the phenomenon that occurs when you rotate the lens and the sensor to intersect the plane of the subject. Sounds complex, turns out to be surprisingly visible in the viewfinder, and nails the focus along the length of the subject - in this case a 1:24 Chevrolet Fleetline. Even at a modest aperture, it's in focus.

All in focus from headlight to rear bumper.

Away from the plane that you select, it goes out of focus faster...so if you want to create a fuzzy effect that is where you do it. Again useful in the studio to diffuse the backdrop and smooth it out. The clients want to see the products, not the brick wall behind them.

Note that the focusing you do with this lens is with the broad front ring. It's well damped, and does not creep. The lens is a pleasure to use.

As always, available now in-store or on-line.

Rise. Tilt To Your Audience. Shift Sideways. Click Your Shutter.

If you are new to photography, you may never have done the dance. The RiseTiltShift Waltz. You have no idea what a delight you are missing.

Those of you old enough to have wrinkles that won't go away may have had a chance to use a view camera or a tilt/shift lens in the past. You know the dance, and when to dance it.

For the newbies - you do the dance when you want undistorted verticals in an architecture shot - or when you want easy stitching for a panorama - or want infinite depth of field for a product or landscape shoot at wide aperture. The Scheimpflug Principle takes care of the last named and the rising front of the camera - or falling back, for that matter - takes care of the first. The shift lets the budding panoramacist add more width to what they do and the stitching programs love the result.

While you can get massive movements on a 4 x 5 or 8 x 10 sheet-film monorail camera, you are a little more restricted with the dedicated tilt/shift lenses that the major DSLR makers provide. Nevertheless there are movements there and you can still dance.

Unfortunately right now there are very little options for we dedicated mirror-less system camera users - only a few limited sorts of adapters that produce a little movement, and no dedicated lenses from the actual makers. We can only hope that the lens designers for our respective brand choices will think to add something of this nature for the lens road maps.

Until then there are a number of us experimenting with tilt/shift movements on our old 4 x 5 cameras by attaching mirror-less bodies to the rear standard and as wide an angle lens as we can find for the front. It's a situation that really wants bag bellows and even then there are compromises in what we see on the LCD screen. One thing - a least most 4 x 5 wide angle lenses have a massive coverage foot print and on a APS-C sensor you don't run out of image as you move.

Fresh Outta The Box

As a retail shop assistant I am a connoisseur of boxes. I analyse the packaging of all the goods that are presented here in the shop. I applaud some and curse others. I struggle to open some of them with a fire axe and then struggle to close them again with a wool press. I am searching for the designers of some of them, and I know where the fire axe is...

All the above to introduce some of the smartest packaging on some of the best value products in the place - the Samyang lenses.

Look at that package - smart, printed well with a usable picture on the outside and the entire specs of the lens on the end-piece. And inside the lens cradled well, but not buried like King Tut in the pyramids. You can get it out and in without strong language.

The lenses themselves are designed well, produced well, and are startlingly economical. You'll always have to do your own focussing as these are all MF and apertures but the optics are really excellent. I see we have Canon-mount, Nikon-mount, Micro 4/3-mount, and a video mount varieties in today. There is even a tilt shift lens for architecture and studio work at  price that should clean the major manufacturer's clocks for them.

Delightful addition to the inventory, and a pleasure to sell.