There area wide variety of photography lenses out
there that are designed for specific genres,such as macro lenses for close-ups,wide-angle lenses for landscapes and telephoto lenses for wildlife.Tilt and shift lenses,however,are considered pretty specialist and for good reason.These lenses are commonly used by professional photographers who want to eliminate the possibility of optical distortions when photo graphing architecture or even landscapes. Unlike standard lenses,tilt and shift lense scan be physically manipulated in order to adjust the plane of focus and perspective within an image.Tilt and shift are also two separate adjustments, both of which can affect a photo in different ways. Tilting the lens left,right,up or down changes the angle of the lens relative to the camera body,which gives you more control over depth of field,so you’re able to determine how much of the image appears in focus.Tilting is often used by pros to put the entire scene in focus, from front to back,or to create the popular miniature photo effect, which essentially makes depth of field much more shallow. On the other hand,shifting the lens up,down or from side to side enables you to include objects with in the photo currently outside the field of view,without having to tilt or move the camera body itself. This means you can photograph tall structures from the ground in their entire by shifting the lens upward so that the top of the structure comes into view.This also prevents optical distortions such as converging verticals,wherea building appears to lean backward due to vertical lines leaning in
The toy town effect
A popular tilt and shift lens effect is turning a standard scene into a miniature toy town. This effect is possible thanks to the lens’s ability to tilt the plane of focus, meaning you can control the depth of field. By pointing the camera down and tilting the lens up, the focal planes in front and behind the subject you want to appear sharp, are thrown out of focus. The blurred areas now replicate a very shallow depth of fi eld you would only otherwise see in close-up macro photography, hence why the scene appears much smaller than it actually is.
Using the shift effect can help you fit much more in a frame
Converging verticals When photographing a structure using a standard lens you have to point the camera upward to include the top and bottom of the building. This will distort the perspective result in converging verticals.
Standard lenses To avoid this with a standard lens, you would need to keep the camera level and shoot face-on to the structure. But shooting tall buildings from the ground means it would be impossible to capture the entire structure within your shot.
Tilt and shift effect A tilt and shift lens enables you to keep the camera face-on to your subject and use a vertical shift movement to capture the entire structure without distortions. As the lens has a larger image circle, it’s possible to incorporate more within the frame.
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Light trails are a colourful and creative effect that photographers can capture by employing long-exposure shooting on their camera. The basic principle of light trail creation is that by manually dropping a camera’s shutter speed to a very low level, light is captured by the sensor over an artificially long period of time, with every passing vehicle having its lights tracked and recorded over the visible distance of the road. To take a shot like this one, find a roadside vantage point in which no other moving objects are visible other than the passing vehicles. Second, mount the camera on a tripod, as stability is key while shooting long-exposure imagery. This is because if there is any camera shake while the unit’s shutter is open, then the captured light will lose its direction and smudge across the entire image. Next select the shutter priority setting on the DSLR camera and drop the shutter speed to the desired level – for shots like these, this means at least a 30-second exposure. Finally, automatically focus on the scene’s background and use an external remote to take the picture. Interestingly, the very same process is also used in light painting, a technique where the streaked light is controlled by the photographer manually, using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to draw custom streaks across a dark backdrop and thereby essentially ‘painting’ in light.
