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.