Regan Shercliffe

This week’s guest writer is Regan Shercliffe and he writes about the use of Tilt Shift lenses in B&W fine arts photography. Regan is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Luther College at the University of Regina in Regina Saskatchewan Canada. He has been taking pictures for a number of years but has become a more serious student of photography over the last year.

Regan’s wonderful B&W and T/S work can be found here on Flickr. Enjoy the article.

Joel Tjintjelaar

Tilt Shift Lenses

The use of tilt shift lenses (t/s) dates back to the 1960s and can be found in everything from architecture to portraits to sports photography. Tilt shift lenses were originally designed to provide architectural and product photographers a way to eliminate the problem of convergence, which is what happens when the camera lens is pointed up or down relative to the object being photographed.

One perhaps unintentional benefit is that a tilt shift lens allows the photographer to selectively focus certain areas of the frame while blurring the rest. This is what drew me to t/s lenses and they can be used to great effect, limited only by the imagination of the individual doing the tilting and shifting. Without going into the mathematics of it all (like I could anyway) the idea of tilt is that you create a selective plane of focus; the width of that plane is determined by the extent to which you literally tilt the lens. Tilting the lens changes the plane of focus relative to the imaging plane. Most t/s lenses allow the user to tilt to a maximum of 8 to 11mm, thereby allowing a subtle selective focus (i.e. 1mm tilt) to a much smaller wedge shaped plane of focus at the maximum tilt. Some landscape photographers will use the tilt function to focus an entire scene without having to use a small aperture, hence avoiding the need for a tripod, but again, I was drawn to those photographers who used the distinctive t/s blur to great effect.

— Lens tilted

— Lens tilted

Shifting is exactly what it sounds like- you literally shift the position of the lens. Sometimes, especially when shooting architecture or tall objects, the top of the structure looks as though it is tapering away. By shifting the lens, you can place the camera parallel to the object hence reducing the effect. You can shift the lens up or down. I have not used the shift function to any great degree, but many architectural photographers make regular use of this function.

— Here the lens is shifted down

Another feature of these lenses (I believe this function is found only on the Canon lenses) is the ability to rotate the entire lens in 30 degree increments up to 90 degrees. You, the intrepid photographer, can basically rotate the plane of the tilt and the direction of the shift. With respect to the tilt, you can have either a vertical line of focus (perpendicular to the plane), or a horizontal line of focus (parallel to the plane- my favourite), complete with diagonal lines of focus at every 30 degree click. The benefit of rotating your lens is that you have a choice of focus in a landscape orientation.

— The lens rotated 30 degrees

Canon makes the lenses in 17, 24, 45 and 90mm versions, and Nikon in 24, 45 and 85mm versions. The 17mm is f4, the 24mm’s are f3.5 and the others are f2.8. There are several other brands and makes available and I would encourage you to check out online auction sites to get an idea of what is available. To my knowledge, they are all manual focus. Those of you who are faint of heart, beware when looking at the prices (especially Canon and Nikon)- these lenses are expensive, but then again what piece of photographic equipment isn’t? That’s how I rationalize it at least (feel free to come up with your own rationalizations and let me know as I could use a few more). For what it is worth, it is some of the best money I have spent on photography equipment and I haven’t had one moment of buyer’s remorse. Furthermore, they make a great straight up lens when not tilted or shifted. For those of you who are more sensible when it comes to purchases, you could look at the Lensbaby line as they are much more reasonably priced, but there is a compromise with respect to features, the quality of the glass and the plane of focus.

I am including a few of my photographs that I shot using a 45mm t/s lens. I most certainly consider myself a novice with respect to the use of these lenses, and I would encourage you to look the photography of Chris Friel and Christer Johansen to see the real potential of these lenses.

— The plane of focus in this shot at the bottom of the frame

— The plane of focus on this shot is in the middle of the frame

— Shot with a vertical plane of focus

— Again, shot with the focus closer to the middle of the frame (sorry to all you 1/3 rule folks)

— Using a t/s for portraiture.

— Finally, some like to use t/ s lenses to create a ‘toy’ effect- not my favourite use of the lens but an interesting effect nonetheless.

References

http://www.shutterbug.net/equipmentreviews/lenses/0801sb_tilt/
Canon EF Lens Manual TS-E45mm. Canon, Japan.

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