Shift Lenses (no tilting) - an open thread

As this is the Architecture Forum I thought it would be interesting to see your shots taken with Shift Lenses.

I thought I would start with a note on what lenses I use and how I use them. I use the Nikon 24mm PC-E f/3.5 this is a tilt/shift lens and the vintage Nikon 35mm PC f/2.8 shift only. The 24mm has electronic aperture control and is manual focus. The 35mm is all manual, meaning you have to focus the lens with the aperture open and then manually close the aperture before taking the shot. Exposure needs to be set manually on both lenses as shifting process upsets the cameras ability to judge exposure correctly. Both lenses give around 11mm of shift which means they will shift the view almost half the sensor height in landscape orientation.

You can also get a 19mm, 45mm and an 85mm Nikon PC lens. I don't have the 19mm as the front projects so much you cant use ND filters. Once I get beyond the need for 35mm I preferer to use a convention lens and correct the slight convergence in post and so haven't tried the longer PC lenses.

No lens corrections are available in Lightroom etc. for shift lenses as the correction varies with the amount of shift. Correction can be a bit tricky as you can get a situation where buildings look like they are getting wider towards the top. After using these lenses for a few years I now tend to adjust the images in post so that the vertical converge very slightly towards the top of the images to me this looks more pleasing than perfectly vertical verticals. Both lenses vignette badly in used in portrait mode with full shift.

Here are a few examples showing the 3 main ways I use these lenses.



In this instance the lens has been used to correct the verticals



In this shot the purpose of the image is to show off the ceiling mounted services. Using a shift lens you can place the camera low down and then shift the lens up so that you can see a lot more of the ceiling and still have vertical edges.



This is 2 vertically shifted images, a high shift and a low shift stitched together to form a panorama. You can see the illusion that makes the building appear to be getting fatter at the top in this image. If you check it with a ruler the image actually converges towards the top.

Andrew HATFIELD | Architectural and Interior Photographer

Good set, thanks for sharing

Nice, really like the colours of the shot 3.

I picked up a Canon 24mm TSE lens a short time ago but not used it much because of weather and life getting in the way.

the third shot looks odd because the eye is very good at picking up even slight discrepancies.
While the Verticals are close to parallel and the measurements in the horizontal at each floor level are also equal. our eyes easily pick out that the length of each floor along the angle is mot but increases progressively floor by floor as its angle increases.
This is always the case when the resultant field of view is greater than 90 degrees., and the vertices have been corrected as is the case here.
It is also the case for drawings that do not take into account the third vanishing point.

Of course those parts of a building that are near enough square to the image frame, do not show this effect, as each floor will have the same length. as is the case in the rightmost section of this building.

The best compromise is often to reintroduce some convergence such that all the actual floor lengths are near equal. There will be some convergence, but it will look more natural. On a building such as this with three faces it is near impossible to get it to look right right at this field of view.

This shot was also taken as a vertical pan in a small courtyard with my back to a wall taken hand held as a two shot pan. It also has strange apparent distortions because of the extreme field of view, however the building is not exactly straight in reality either.

Some from a few years ago when I had a TS-E lens

Roche Abbey ( post Henry V111)




Conisborough Castle ( Post Civil War)




Panorama shifted sideways



All with a Canon 24mm TS-E Mk2 on a 5DMk 11