Shift Lens Notes

 

This is a collection of posts I made on the DPR Forum concerning shift lenses and Architecture. Just some slight editing to make them make sense out of context.

To do architectural photography at a certain lever, shift lenses are a must. They will allow you to compose precisely in camera without the hit and miss framing that you get when you do it in post. I only "do it in post " when I cannot use one of my shift lenses.

I quote from James Ewing from his textbook Follow the Sun. A book  aimed at professionals and students and considered a standard text.

"You might ask yourself "Do I really need an expensive tilt shift lens" Can't I just correct the perspective later in Photoshop?" The answer is yes you could correct it later, but the tilt shift lens allows you to see and feel the perspective of the images you are shooting. The final crop and ultimately the entire composition will be totally different in a shot that is corrected in post. If you cannot see the image while you are shooting you cannot control the composition and therefore you cannot effectively interpret the building. Correcting the perspective during post production causes a significant loss of sharpness and detail. The Tilt shift lens gives you accurate, sharp controlled images."

I think this says it all.

The old Nikon 28 mm and 35mm shift lenses are a cheap way to get started.  I picked up my Nikon 24 TS and 45mm TS for less than €1000

I find the angle I am shooting from, can give distorted results. I use diagonal shift a lot to sort these sorts of problems. Shots taken from the same position:

Vertical shift

Diagonal shift

My pictures below show what happens when you use a zoom with barrel distortion and correct in post. A wonky building looks more wonky. Don't ask me why!

Here is a church that is 800 years old. It has survived at least  a couple of strong earthquakes and the land in the mountains moves.  My TS lens shows the bell tower leaning.  But a test shot taken with a zoom shot and then corrected in post exaggerates the "Tower of Pisa" problems that this bell tower has. The wall on the left has problems too.

Shift with the camera level

Test shot corrected in post

Here I have overlaid the two images. The front is a almost perfect match with the hit and mis matching I did. The tower is very different. Both where shot with 24mm lenses

I think a whole lot of things added up. I have under corrected the front in this versione.

Closer this time but the tower seems wider and squatter, stretched in the correction.

I need to do this test in more controlled conditions, but this overlay raises some interesting questions.

When do I reach for M43 and when do I reach for something else?

This is a Thread I made on the DPR Forum in 2019. My opinions have changed as the Nikon Z system removed my need to run two systems, as the Z7 + 24-200 is a very powerful and lightweight travel solution, and I can also use it for my more static photogrphy with shift lenses, via the FTZ. But it was a nice thread, that unfortunately got a lot of hostile comments at the time. But M43 remains in my opinion, a really valid travel camera system.

When do I reach for M43 and of course when do I reach for something else?

Well the EM5 came along when I was doing a lot of hiking in the high Apennines. A nice three lens kit that covers 7mm-100mm is easy to carry on a long day hike. I sometimes throw the nice 60mm macro in the rucksack too.

Italy is very hot and often humid. For this trip to Bergamo in summer I was out and about all day and my three-lens set up gave me versatility and low weight and less sweat.

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Bologna, I had my compact kit in my briefcase and after a work appointment I had time to explore the city.

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It was easier persuading the custodian to let me take some pictures with my little “unprofessional” looking camera. Photography was not allowed here.

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A two hour walk to get to this place where I new I wanted the longest lens possible. The 100-300 is a sweet little lens that gets the job done without killing myself with a heavy lens.

The 100-300 on a tripod was transportable whilst taking a series of shots around this railway station by Calatrava. M43 is great with long lenses.

My EM5 fits in my briefcase. It was the obvious choice when I wanted to record a steel structure my studio designed for my web site.

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A crowded club where the notoriously grumpy Carl Palmer was playing. My EM5 with the little 35-100 was discrete, silent and face detect work a treat. Same for the other concert shot. The quality is more than fine.

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View: original size

Then there are occasions when I reach for something else.

I needed to pull a lot of detail out of the shadows on this shot taken on a medieval road in the Apennines. My D700/ 810 lets me work a lot on the files before unacceptable noise sets in.

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I am doing a lot more architectural photography. A Nikon PC lens, plus an old D700 cost me less than a good lens. The results are more natural and more controllable than key stoning in post.

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When I need subtle colour or tone transitions the D810 is my best choice.

Or when I do not have or want to carry a "proper camera" there is the iPhone.

Or my little LX100, my street camera.

I think my photographic interests are common to many here, travel, landscape, events and such. Nothing very specialist or extreme

I hope this thread usefully puts the eternal format diatribe into some little perspective.

The Perils of Doing it in Post

 Just a little story from a photo shoot at a Romanesque building near Parma, in Italy.

You can see the whole story here .

The most interesting piece in this church is the twelfth century font. Its sides are very irregular and not always vertical. I used my Z7 to photograph it at first, but then I wondered how I would do the correction in post as I was shooting downwards even with my tripod at its lowest height.

With the 45 TS I was able to shoot with the camera level. and the lens dropped down.

When I got back home the 45TS shots just needed some basic adjustment, whilst the Z7 shots were almost impossible to correct to match the actual object.

To Close for Comfort

This might be of interest to those who photograph architecture and old monuments. It is a result of an experiment to rescue a shot i took at the Pieve of Gropina, in Tuscany.

The highlight of this church is the wonderful pulpit, but it is roped off like many such items in our monuments, to protect it from overenthusiastic visitors. So I had to shot with my wide zoom at 20mm, to avoid the ropes. The stretching in the resulting shot is quite strong.

As an experiment I ran it through DXO Viewpoint using the wide angle stretching tool. To me it looks much more natural. The perfect lens would have been the 45mm, but the ropes ruined the shot.

What do you think?

Original 20mm shot

Unstretched in Viewpoint.

Playing with Perspective Effects

I have been wanting to do this exercise for some time. I took my 4 shift lenses to the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena to use the Ossario by Aldo Rossi as a test scene. I wanted to see the prospective effects as I switched lenses. Being a cube, it was almost perfect subject for my test. I stated with the 45mm TS and then attached the 35PC, 28PC and lastly the 24TS. I tried to fit the building equally into the pictures, but there is a certain approximation in my testing.

My first reaction is that the 45TS "flattens" to much at some angles. The 35PC seems the most natural, the 28PC neither here nor there and the 24mm the most dramatic. The 24mm is good for modern buildings but perhaps too much for older monuments.

The next test will be to find some old church with enough space to enable the use of the same four lenses for a similar test, but with the addition of diagonal shifts. Bell towers seem to be the critical part of the rendering of old churches, if you are not front on. But I want to codify this type of subject to make lens choice in the field easier.

I also met a charming American Architect who had travelled all the way up from Florence to Modena, just to see Aldo Rossi's creation here. She was pleased to find sombody to take a picture of her in front of the cube.

What do you think renders best?

PS this could be done in post too. So no polemic please

45mm

35mm

28mm

24mm

EDIT

Edited to Incluse a 15mm shift lens

45mm

35mm

28mm

24mm