Samyang 24mm Tilt/shift

jerry12953

jerry12953

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Jeremy Moore
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I'm just toying the idea of trying a bit of tilt/shift landscape photography and wonder if this would be the easiest/cheapest way of getting into it.

I know the lens is not rated that highly but I COULD justify spending that kind of money on a try-it-and-see basis.

Any thoughts?
 
Before making any comments can I ask on what camera you would be using the lens?
 
You can do the shift function (plus lens geometry corrections to perect linearity) in a suitable editor, so you can try that out for free. For tilting the plane of focus you must have a tilt-shift lens.
 
jerry12953 said:
Yes, I often correct verticals and horizontals in Lightroom, but you tend to have to do a big crop at the same time. Is that the sort of thing shift controls are used for?

I like the look of some images I've seen using tilt on e.g. large format cameras.
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Yes. Tilt shift is great. TBH I just use the shift.

I have a Nikkor one and use it for architecture. Look at the blog here, I have not had to crop or do much in PP and look at my verticals and EXIF on the last 3 images.

http://www.sftphotography.co.uk/la-cite-de-carcassonne/
 
Personally I would hire one to have a go, that's what I did before I bought mine, lensesforhire have the Mk1 for £49 for 3 days and the Mk2 for £69, it might be worth seeing if they are doing any holiday deals (www.lensesforhire.co.uk)
I have had a quick look at the Samyang specs and I cannot see if it can tilt and shift in the same plane like the Canon Mk2 .Having had both the Mk1 and now the Mk2 that ability which is not present in the Mk1 ( without dismantling the lens) is very valuable, you don't need it very often but when you do it makes a world of difference.
Using a TS-E is a different mindset in that it really slows you down and makes you think about your shot which is no bad thing.
Personally given your camera if having tried one you liked the concept of using a TS-E lens I would save up a bit more ( well a lot more) and get the Canon 24mm Mk2 , you should be able to pick up a used one for around £1K, really if you are going to get a TS-E you might as well get the best.
Another thought I know it is very expensive and the rarely appear used but the 17mm is worth considering , it takes a TC very well and does give great flexibilty albeit at a price.
If you do decide to get one whichever way have a look here (http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/using_tilt.html) its quite illuminating.
Best of Luck whichever way you go
 
like Chris has said I would definitely look at hiring one from www.lenshire.co.uk first they usually cost a fair old bit of wonga for a lens that could end up sitting in your bag or worse still at home :(
 
ST4 said:
Yes. Tilt shift is great. TBH I just use the shift.

I have a Nikkor one and use it for architecture. Look at the blog here, I have not had to crop or do much in PP and look at my verticals and EXIF on the last 3 images.

http://www.sftphotography.co.uk/la-cite-de-carcassonne/
Click to expand...


Don't you use the tilt at all? It looks like the most fun you can have with a TS lens!

troutfisher said:
Personally I would hire one to have a go, that's what I did before I bought mine, lensesforhire have the Mk1 for £49 for 3 days and the Mk2 for £69, it might be worth seeing if they are doing any holiday deals (www.lensesforhire.co.uk)
I have had a quick look at the Samyang specs and I cannot see if it can tilt and shift in the same plane like the Canon Mk2 .Having had both the Mk1 and now the Mk2 that ability which is not present in the Mk1 ( without dismantling the lens) is very valuable, you don't need it very often but when you do it makes a world of difference.
Using a TS-E is a different mindset in that it really slows you down and makes you think about your shot which is no bad thing.
Personally given your camera if having tried one you liked the concept of using a TS-E lens I would save up a bit more ( well a lot more) and get the Canon 24mm Mk2 , you should be able to pick up a used one for around £1K, really if you are going to get a TS-E you might as well get the best.
Another thought I know it is very expensive and the rarely appear used but the 17mm is worth considering , it takes a TC very well and does give great flexibilty albeit at a price.
If you do decide to get one whichever way have a look here (http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/using_tilt.html) its quite illuminating.
Best of Luck whichever way you go
Click to expand...

Thanks! I'd be worried if I hired the Canon mk 2 I might feel that I had to buy one, and I don't think I can justify it at the mo. But hiring in general sounds like a good idea.
 
jerry12953 said:
Don't you use the tilt at all? It looks like the most fun you can have with a TS lens!



Thanks! I'd be worried if I hired the Canon mk 2 I might feel that I had to buy one, and I don't think I can justify it at the mo. But hiring in general sounds like a good idea.
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If you just want the tilt and shift in the same plane look at the Canon Mk1, You can set the tilt and shift in the same plane but its a few minutes work with a screwdriver unlike the Mk2 where it is just a switch and the Mk1 is half the price of the Mk2
 
troutfisher said:
If you just want the tilt and shift in the same plane look at the Canon Mk1, You can set the tilt and shift in the same plane but its a few minutes work with a screwdriver unlike the Mk2 where it is just a switch and the Mk1 is half the price of the Mk2
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I really don't fancy going down the screwdriver route.....;). But what do you mean by tilting and shifting in the same plane? It looks like I need a tutorial before I go much further...
 
jerry12953 said:
I really don't fancy going down the screwdriver route.....;). But what do you mean by tilting and shifting in the same plane? It looks like I need a tutorial before I go much further...
Click to expand...

On the Canon Mk2 lenses, the shift and tilt directions can be set independently. The shift can be rotated so that it is either up/down or left/right. The tilt can also be rotated independently of shift so that tilting can be up/down or left right.

On other lenses, the tilt/shift cannot be set independently and are linked. The Canon ones offer the most versatility in this regard.

Regards...
 
jerry12953 said:
I really don't fancy going down the screwdriver route.....;). But what do you mean by tilting and shifting in the same plane? It looks like I need a tutorial before I go much further...
Click to expand...

The Canon TS-E Mk 1 is set up so that it goes up and down ( Shift ) and left to right ( tilt), it will rotate through 90 degrees so it will shift left to right and tilt up and down-the tilt shift is in opposite planes.
When tilt and shift are in the same plane it will shift up and down and also tilt up and down, so in the case of a landscape with say mountains in the background you can shift up and down to get all the mountains in the shot and also tilt up and down to get the foreground and a distant object in sharp focus.
To change the setup in the Mk1 is as I said a screwdriver job while in the Mk2 its just press a button which is why I said does the Samyang have the same ability as the Mk2 Canon, if it does then its worth considering( the IQ will not be up to Mk2 standards but then not much is , it is considered one of Canons sharpest lenses but then at the thick end of £1500 it should be!) if not then you might as well get the Canon Mk1 and have it changed
 
Hire first Jerry, and bone up all you can beforehand so you can get stuck straight in.

I hired a Canon 24mm Mk2 last year from Stewart/LFH for an architectural job with a lot of big interiors but if I did more of that I'd buy one for sure.

For landscape, tilting for extra DoF is handy, but there's a lot of that at 24mm anyway. Minor correction of verticals I do in post - zoom back a bit first so you have plenty of image to work with. I don't do big verticals corrections as it just looks weird.

But, but... the thing I really loved, and used a lot, was the panoramas ability - with none of the stretched wide-angle look*, nor the usually curved effect with regular panos. Using max shift, you get a 12mm-ish lens field of view side to side, and with loads more sensor area and tons of pixels. Image quality is just fabulous (y)

*not true! See posts 19 and 20 below.
 
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Have always lusted after the Canon mk2.
I really enjoy viewing some of the panos which people have taken with this. I also love the methodical way this lens forced you to work....
 
HoppyUK said:
Hire first Jerry, and bone up all you can beforehand so you can get stuck straight in.

I hired a Canon 24mm Mk2 last year from Stewart/LFH for an architectural job with a lot of big interiors but if I did more of that I'd buy one for sure.

[...]. But, but... the thing I really loved, and used a lot, was the panoramas ability - with none of the stretched wide-angle look, nor the usually curved effect with regular panos. Using max shift, you get a 12mm-ish lens field of view side to side, and with loads more sensor area and tons of pixels. Image quality is just fabulous (y)
Click to expand...

I've heard this interesting effect of shift-lens stitching to get a wider angle mentioned before.

My understanding is that "the usual curved effect with regular panos" is that regular panos use a cylindrical perspective projection, I.e. they preserve the geometric linearity of a rectilinear lens, which captures straight lines in the world as straight lines in the image, in the vertical dimension, but in the horizontal direction employ the angle-preserving perspective projection of the fish-eye, in other words equal angles between things in the world becomes equal linear distances in the image plane. That is in fact necessary for wide panos, because there's a strict limit of maximum angle of view over which linearity can be preserved. 180 degrees is the absolute limit, because at 180 degrees angle of view the stretching becomes infinite. Things became increasingly weirder at the edges as stretching becomes more exaggerated. Sophisticated panorama stitchers however permit you to select between different kinds of perspective projection.

Note that this wide angle stretching at the edges isn't a function of the wide angle lens. A pinhole camera with no lens at all does exactly the same the same thing. In fact the stretching is a consequence of looking at the printed image from a further point of view than that with which the camera saw the image. If you move your eye as close to the image as needed for it to subtend the wider angle of view of the camera lens then the edge stretching effect completely disappears. It's an artefact of viewing a wide angle image from too far away, as the perspective painters of the Renaissance discovered and sometimes played tricks with.

The "stretched wide angle look", such as making those people at the edges of a wide angle group shot look fatter, is a natural consequence of a wide angle linear perspective projection. A fish-eye lens however, which translates subtended angles in the world view into distances in the image plane can be thought of as a volume preserver rather than a straight line preserver, and leaves those people at the edges of a group shot the same apparent width as they really are (the group should be arranged in a circular arc). So a cylindrical projection won't stretch the width of people at the edges of a group shot, without the unpleasant curving of architectural verticals near the image edges characteristic of the fish-eye.

These reports of the rather special wide angle effect produced by shift lenses seem to be suggesting that the stitching approach to a widened semi-panorama which you can do with a shift-lens, shifting from side to side, doesn't do the edge stretching of a linear wide angle lens. If the camera isn't moved, just the lens shifted from side to side to side, my geometric intuition (which may well be wrong :-) ) suggests that that will just duplicate the effect of a wider angle linear lens if the stitching is just done by simple concatenation. But of course the stitching process may do more than simple concatenation. Not having a shift lens to play with I'm hoping someone with a better understanding of the processes involved can tell me what's going on.
 
Chris, re your last paragraph, you're right - the shifted/stitched pano trick gives the same perspective as a super-wide rectilinear lens. I don't know why I wrote otherwise! Apologies.
 
I changed my Mk1, its a simple job which requires unscrewing 4 screws and turning the top 90'. I find it a great lens and extremely light weight, although cant comment on the Mk2.
 
paul100 said:
I changed my Mk1, its a simple job which requires unscrewing 4 screws and turning the top 90'. I find it a great lens and extremely light weight, although cant comment on the Mk2.
Click to expand...

That's interesting . The Mk2 is supposed to be much better though.

Has anyone any experience of the Samyang?
 
HoppyUK said:
Hire first Jerry, and bone up all you can beforehand so you can get stuck straight in.

I hired a Canon 24mm Mk2 last year from Stewart/LFH for an architectural job with a lot of big interiors but if I did more of that I'd buy one for sure.

For landscape, tilting for extra DoF is handy, but there's a lot of that at 24mm anyway. Minor correction of verticals I do in post - zoom back a bit first so you have plenty of image to work with. I don't do big verticals corrections as it just looks weird.

But, but... the thing I really loved, and used a lot, was the panoramas ability - with none of the stretched wide-angle look*, nor the usually curved effect with regular panos. Using max shift, you get a 12mm-ish lens field of view side to side, and with loads more sensor area and tons of pixels. Image quality is just fabulous (y)

*not true! See posts 19 and 20 below.
Click to expand...


Just another thought about this.

As I understand it the image circle of a T/S lens is much bigger than the normal lens of the same focal length. Using the tilt and shift functions you're effectively selecting which part of the image circle you want. Is my understanding correct?

If one can master the techniques involved in creating stitched pano's , does the 24mm T/S have the ability, in effect, to be a wider lens than 24mm?
 
jerry12953 said:
Just another thought about this.

As I understand it the image circle of a T/S lens is much bigger than the normal lens of the same focal length. Using the tilt and shift functions you're effectively selecting which part of the image circle you want. Is my understanding correct?

If one can master the techniques involved in creating stitched pano's , does the 24mm T/S have the ability, in effect, to be a wider lens than 24mm?
Click to expand...

1) Yes your understanding about image circle is correct

2) The 24mm has about 12mm shift in each direction , if you use the full shift you get slight vignetting but its not too bad so doing pano,s is a doddle, although exposure can be a bit tricky
Also but I have never been able to master how to do it by rotating the lens through through 45 and 90 degrees and shifting you can create a pano which is both wide and tall.

Happy Xmas

Chris
 
jerry12953 said:
Just another thought about this.

As I understand it the image circle of a T/S lens is much bigger than the normal lens of the same focal length. Using the tilt and shift functions you're effectively selecting which part of the image circle you want. Is my understanding correct?
Click to expand...

Yes.

If one can master the techniques involved in creating stitched pano's , does the 24mm T/S have the ability, in effect, to be a wider lens than 24mm?
Click to expand...

Yes, a lot wider. I didn't do any exact calculations but it's very close to 12mm lens equiv across the long side, though image height remains the same of course. In the Canon 24 TS-II review linked below from TheDigitalPicture, there's a patchwork image about 2/3rds of the way down the page (house/window shot) that shows the whole image circle and the coverage you can build with it. Panos are dead easy and very fast to do - once you're set-up exactly level. Software does all the tricky stitching and matching stuff in seconds.

I did them in three images (left, middle, right) which gives a huge overlap. I think you can actually get the same coverage using just left/right, but I did middle too for best image quality. You don't even have to twiddle the knobs, just push it across gently - faster/easier for big movements.

There's also a review of the Samyang 24/TS on TDP so you can compare the two.

Canon http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-TS-E-24mm-f-3.5-L-II-Tilt-Shift-Lens-Review.aspx
Samyang http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Samyang-24mm-f-3.5-Tilt-Shift-Lens-Review.aspx
 
I have the samyang 24mm ts. I can tell you first hand it is a cracking lens! The canons are no better just more money!
 
I also have one and use it on a Nikon. It is excellent and unlike the Nikon can tilt and shift at the same time without requiring a factory modification. The colours that the lens produced however are on the warm side compared to Nikon glass. Not as good as a proper large fort camera of course.

The main issue is that there is no tension when the acres to tilt or shift are released so the lens flops straight down. If I owned a Canon camera however i would probably save for the official ones, they are supposed to be amazing.
 
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