P#17 Q3C: What is a Tilt Shift Lens?
If you've never heard of a tilt shift lens before, Bill Neill explains what it is and how to use it
Bill had mentioned a tilt shift lens earlier on in the interview. I asked him to elaborate on what a tilt shift lens was for the listeners who didn't know. He did a great job of explaining it.
The Tilt Shift Lens Explained
Bill Neill: A tilt shift lens is a lens that has two camera movements that are analogous to what a 4x5 camera does.
You can raise the front element of the lens up. That would be used for perspective control. Say if you were aiming a wide angle lens at a grove of trees and aimed upwards, it would converge towards the top.
A tilt shift lens can also be level and aim straight ahead, and if you raise the front element as you would with a 4x5, the film plane stays parallel to the trees and the perspective stays straight. You don't have the converging.
The tilt shift lens also can be used for depth of field control, which is what I use it for nearly all the time.
Say you have the lot of depth in a scene and want to use a wide aperture, ripples on a lake for example. You have a detail that you want to use a telephoto on. If you want to use a fast shutter speed, you can't stop down to get the front ripples and the back ripples sharp.
If I use my 90mm and gain the focus from near to far with the tilt rather than the aperture, I can shoot at any shutter speed and gain sharpness near to far. That gives me a great deal of flexibility.
Another example would be a field of flowers. I often put a 2x on my 90mm so I have a long telephoto. By photographing flowers, I want to compress the depth to make the impact stronger. I will use that 180mm. You focus on the front flowers and tilt the lens back to the get the rear flowers sharpened.
You can almost, depending on the situation, shoot wide open and still get near to far sharp. If the flowers are very tall and you have a lot of depth up and down as well as near to far, you'll still need to stop down and use a smaller aperture. It gives you a great deal of flexibility.
Having been a 4x5 photographer for so long, it's just natural for me to gravitate to that type of lens. Like I said, I have a 24mm. Canon also makes a 45mm and a 90mm tilt-shift lens. They're invaluable to me.
In Closing
We always knew camera lenses weren't all created equal, but not all of us knew how valuable a tilt shift lens could be. Bill Neill uses them often, and he suggests that other landscape photographers use a tilt shift lens as well.
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