In the previous section, I explained how you can use a tilt-shift lens to tilt the plane of focus to keep everything sharp.īut did you know that you can also tilt the plane of focus to make nearly everything blurry? A Tilt-Shift Lens Offers Creative Effects You can’t autofocus with a tilt-shift lens.īut this often isn’t a problem, because tilt-shift photography is a pretty deliberate, careful art to begin with. They allow you to keep everything in focus, even when your scene is extremely deep.īy the way, there is one drawback to tilt-shift lenses: That’s what makes tilt-shift lenses so powerful for landscape photography. Instead, you could have a very shallow depth of field–but you could tilt the plane of focus, so that it covers the flowers in the foreground and the mountains in the background with ease. You wouldn’t have to use a narrow aperture at all. On the other hand, if you had a tilt-shift lens instead… Instead, you may have to rely on another technique, such as focus stacking, which is very cumbersome and doesn’t really work if you have anything moving in the frame. But at such narrow apertures, you’re bound to get a significant loss of sharpness due to diffraction.Īnd even f/16 might not cut it. To achieve such an effect, you’d need to dial in an aperture of at least f/16. You’d need an incredibly deep depth of field–that stretched all the way from the flowers in the foreground to the mountains in the background.
There are flowers in the foreground and mountains in the background.īut if you were shooting with a standard lens, one that offered a standard plane of focus (that sits parallel to the image sensor), this would be really hard to do. Landscape photographers love tilt-shift lenses.īecause a tilt-shift lens allows you to maximize your depth of field–and keep the whole image sharp, from front to back.įor instance, imagine you’re shooting a sweeping landscape scene. Instead, when you photograph a building from below (while using the shift function) it’s as if you shifted the lens upward, so that your camera is levitating toward the middle of the building.īut why is this actually important? How can tilt-shift lenses help your photography? A Tilt-Shift Lens Maximizes Depth of Field You see, you can actually shift a tilt-shift lens, so that you don’t get the normal perspective distortion at all. This is referred to as perspective distortion, and it’s the reason why buildings appear to be falling backward when they’re shot from below.īut a tilt-shift lens does away with all the standard perspective distortion rules. The sides of the building will appear to converge as they go higher and higher into the sky. If you photograph the top of a building from down on the ground, you’ll end up with an interesting result: Now, technically speaking, this focusing feature is the tilt aspect of tilt-shift lenses.īut tilt-shift lenses offer another feature, too: …as are parts of the scene that are farther away.Īnd other parts of the scene will be out-of-focus, even if they’re located right next to parts of the scene that are in focus. The practical result is that parts of the scene that are near to you are in focus…
This ensures that the lens glass is not parallel with the sensor.Īnd it re-orients the plane of focus in the image. In other words, the part of the image that is sharp appears like a rectangular cut-out.īut with a tilt-shift lens, you have the option of tilting the lens. Well, the parallel glass is designed to create a parallel plane of focus. So the glass inside the lens is parallel to the image sensor.
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