Well, that's a pleasant surprise, didn't expect to see this to show up on HN. I really love the photography style they feature, and it's often an inspiration for my own shooting.<p>My opinionated take: if you're going for architecture or ultrawide, just buy a 9mm lens and crop. My Laowa 9mm is my favorite lens by far. If you want AF, there's the new 10mm that recently came out.<p>Why not T/S? Correcting vignette is time intensive (unless the lens has an EXIF chip, but I don't have experience with that); image quality is not as good (I found the Laowa 15mm shift lens to just be straight up worse even when accounting for different focal length); they're heavier and take more fiddling.<p>Why not perspective-correct a 12mm? I found that it's impossible to compose shots well (corners end up cut off, composing the shot is difficult), and there were situations where 12mm just wasn't wide enough.
One of my favorite contemporary photographers, David Schalliol, has an “isolated buildings” series, and he uses a tilt shift lens to achieve parallel lines for the buildings, to striking effect.<p><a href="http://davidschalliol.com/photography" rel="nofollow">http://davidschalliol.com/photography</a>
Many (30ish) years ago, I subscribed (or my parents did on my behalf, I was 9) to Model Railroader magazine. A significant portion of that hobby seemed to be focused on this sort of photography and the construction or use of these lenses.<p>I haven’t thought about it much since then (or much at the time, since I was a lot less interested in the detailed modeling and a lot more interested in the control systems and coming up with complex track layouts), but the pictures those guys took were always pretty cool.
Tilt-Shift lenses are great and I own one but ... just like many things in photography now-a-days, computation can do much of this.<p>No, it's not perfect just like an iPhone doesn't take as a good a picture as a high-end Canon/Nikon/Sony. But, AFAIK, all modern phones have perspective correction built in to their photo editor controls. I use them quite often to do the same things (in relation to perspective) as seen in the article. Again, they aren't as nice but 99.9% of the time the images I personally take are only going to be seen on a small screen. And even on a large screen (my 65" TV) they still look great at a glance.<p>There's two features I wish were more common.<p>1. Changing the size of the image. Say you take a 1000x1500 image, in adjusting the perspective to make the verticals not converge you'd really need the image to be 1000x2000. No app I know if will do this. As you adjust the perspective there's no option to increase the size of the image to fit the result so stuff just gets cropped. Ideally it would let me opt into auto-increasing the size of the image to fit the plane of the original after its tilted. (note: I get I could do this in photoshop by pulling the image into a larger document. I'm just annoyed I have to go that far and wish I could do it in the phone in the default photo editor as I just the perspective.)<p>2. Let me change the perspective live while I'm taking the picture. IIRC I found apps that do this but they want $10-$20 a month. Here's hoping Apple and Google add it to the default camera apps. This could be even better because given computational photography the phone can take 10-20 shots at 1000fps and then merge them for higher res in the areas where there's less censor pixels per arc angle.
> <i>A “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</i><p>I have a panorama head (Manfrotto 303SPH). It's enormous, weights around 3kg and... I <i>never</i> use it.<p>In my experience, Lightroom does an extremely good job at stitching panoramas from handheld shots, as long as there is reasonable overlap between shots. Seems to work perfectly every time.
45TSE is probably one of my top 3 fav portrait lenses, the glass is really something special on that lens, un-tilted the clarity is just phenomenal. Not sure what it is, but I love shooting with it, and it's fun to tilt in portraiture! :) <a href="https://s.h4x.club/DOuJJKJp" rel="nofollow">https://s.h4x.club/DOuJJKJp</a>
The miniature effect you can achieve with tilt/shift lenses is very cool, but I've always wondered: <i>why</i> does the result look miniature? Is it that it has the same visual problems that a cheap-ish lens focused on a miniature would have (e.g. very shallow depth of field)?<p>(My brain wants to know what my eyes seem to intuit...)
I first did tilt-shift photography as a teenager before I even knew what it was called, when I inherited a crown graphic from my grandfather, and I noted that I could change the plane of the lens, and could see on the ground glass viewfinder what the effect was. Had great fun running around Italy with a backpack full of Polaroids and a far more precious supply of 4x5 colour positives, taking architectural photographs. Had less fun developing them all at home later - the colour positive process is not easy.<p>I’ve since tried tilt shift with my DSLR but it just ain’t the same - it gives good enough results, but not much that you can’t do in post - whereas looking at some of the prints from the crown graphic, the quality and the… I don’t know, <i>quality</i>… of the images is different - better.<p>I guess my view is that it’s worthwhile with wet photography, but not with digital.
Quite surprised to see something of this genre discussed here without any mention of the obvious benefits in industrial process.<p>By normalizing the spatial representation of the captured image, it is possible to perform quantitative analysis without any additional processing overhead or associated temporal delay.<p>Presumably sharp focus and a lack of distortion would grant similar benefits when training machine learning for visual applications.<p>Source: Own multiple books on the early era of photography when tilt-shift was a normal feature ("view cameras") and have designed a fair number of autonomous optical systems. The best book I have, for the benefit of others, is <i>View Camera Technique (7th Edition)</i>.
A stellar article by Bastian Kratzke as usual.<p>Using tilt to increase depth of field is incredibly useful in macro photography. For example this picture of sushi by Ming Thein [1] using the Nikkor PC-E 85mm lens. It's particularly useful when the subject is mostly flat, like a watch.<p>I personally have a Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Shift lens, with which I took a picture of the Hallidie Building [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mingthein/6912586530/" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/mingthein/6912586530/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hallidie_Building_in_San_Francisco_dllu.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hallidie_Building_in_San_...</a>
A pro photographer friend of mine stopped using Tilt/Shift lenses for architecture, he says the image quality is noticeably better if you correct the perspective in photoshop/lightroom afterwards.
I was just watching a YouTube channel that Tilt Shifts video games. Here's one for Elden Ring:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/dZ9RU7pznTs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dZ9RU7pznTs</a>
A tilt/shift lens is great… but it’s nowhere near as flexible as a field or monorail view camera.<p>Luckily they tended to be built to last and there’s load of them out there, if you know where to look.
The Canon RF backfocus distance is short enough that you can get a tilt/shift adapter that lets you just chuck a medium format lens on the camera. Pretty slick.
If you're interested, "Little Big World" is a very pleasant YouTube channel who does tiltshift videos of global cities set to classical music.
The key thing about all TS-lenses I know of is they only support manual focus; while this may not be a problem for architecture or landscape photography I'm too casual to try to focus a portrait manually (Gregory Heisler talks about doing this in his book "50 portraits" and I love his work).<p>Rumour has it that Canon's RF-mount tilt-shift lenses will support autofocus though...
Just watched Poor Things[0], up for 11 oscars including best pic.<p>Anyway, they used some crazy fisheye lens effects, and also some tilt shift.<p>[0] : <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/poor_things" rel="nofollow">https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/poor_things</a>