Tilt-Shift Photography

Tilt-Shift Photography involves various camera movements Tilt and Shift movements of the lens or the mount of lens. It has usages like for Miniature Faking. Basically, the functions ‘Tilt’ and ‘Shift’ are independent, so there are lenses that allow for example, only shift and there are professional cameras in which the function tilt and shift through is not implemented through mechanics of the lens itself, but by the camera alone.

Lens for Tilt-Shift Photography

In case of DSLR, most consumer and prosumer grade camera has no tilt and shift mechanism by the body of the camera. A tilt-and-shift lens (also shortened as TS lens, T & S lens) is a special lens for Tilt“Shift Photography, which is the lens system in relation to the plane of the sensor. Normally both planes are parallel and meets at infinity.

Shift : Shift lenses allow the correct display of the image format, if for some reasons the space can not project vertically on the screen. Also, an accurate blending of images of two or more projections.

Tilt : By pivoting the lens system allows the focal plane to shift. The sharpness level, the desired object level needs to be adjusted. This may be done for technical purposes (like bringing a solid sharpness in an inclined plane) as well as fr visual design purposes (controlling depth of field is used to simulate a lower depth).

Basics of Tilt-Shift Photography

So basically we need Tilt-Shift Lens for Tilt-Shift Photography. There are many usages of Tilt-Shift Photography like what is known as Miniature faking or diorama effect. In case of miniature faking, a real-size set of objects are made to look like a photograph of a miniature scale model. It is just the reverse of what we do with scale model photography. Blurring parts of the photo in different directions simulate the shallow depth of field making the proportions in the scene seem to be much smaller than it actually is.

The additional (selective) blur is sometimes desired for portraits, can be modeled with an image processing program, but it does not derive the information of depth. At present there are for Tilt-Shift lens available for full frame and medium-format DSLR systems. Tilt-Shift of lenses are manufactured by Canon and Nikon, as well are available from Zeiss, Leica and other good lens manufacturers. The use of a T & S lens is significantly different from conventional lenses. First, the camera is pointed with normal lens at the subject and proper exposure required is measured. This is the first step and is important because almost all cameras expose massively wrong with this class of lena lens with TTL metering. Then the camera is aligned so that the senor plane is parallel to the plane which is to be presented without distortion, in the case of architecture and landscape photography that is mainly meant by the exact horizontal alignment. When using a shift lens it is almost always used with a tripod. This not only makes the focus and framing precisely fixed, but also can be used to achieve a large depth of field or a high sharpness without and camera shake.