Tilt-Shift Lens

This shows one of the "real" reasons people would shell out a few thousand dollars for a tilt-shift lens for a 35mm-size camera — so that buildings that are tilting back can be straightened up, primarily for serious architectural photography.

Rather than aim the camera up at Nicole and the building I shifted the lens.

Compare this to panel 2 where I aimed the camera up instead: the building tilts back.

Here I was using the tilt-shift lens, but set it to normal lens position.

Here I took the image from panel 2 and straightened up the building in computer, and it looks pretty good. So why spend the bucks for the tilt-shift lens? Maybe because you do serious architectural photography and you want to keep post-processing to a minimum. Or you shoot film and don't believe in computers.

Here the tilt property was used to throw the foreground out of focus, much more out of focus than you could get from a 24mm lens by shooting wide open. This is getting into similar territory as the lens baby.

Here is the other reason people are shooting with tilt-shift lenses: under certain conditions, you can make normal scenes look just like miniatures — easily more striking than this example.

The only problem with this approach is that is essentially a one-trick pony: how many times would anybody want to make a scene look like a toy scene?

Here is the "control" image: the same as panel 5, but with no lens tilt.

Note that the actual dollhouse scene below, shot with lots of depth of field, doesn't shout out "dollhouse" because it is all in focus.

Image courtesy of The Great American Dollhouse Museum.

Here the normal image from panel 6 was blurred in computer to give it that abnormally short depth of field.

Indicates to me that you can do this fairly well without a tilt-shift lens.

Below is an example of an actual dollhouse scene from The Great American Dollhouse Museum in Danville, Kentucky. Note that the lack of depth of field when using a wide angle lens DOES give it that dollhouse look.

A miniature look fail.

You can't make any old scene look miniature with the tilt-shift lens effect — it has to be a scene that the viewer can believe is a toy "set", in a box. Nicole does not look like a doll (in that sense).

Below, for comparison, are two actual dolls I photographed at the Great American Dollhouse in Kentucky. The shallow depth of field helps us see them as dolls, but mostly we see them as dolls because they ARE dolls.

This shows one of the "real" reasons people would shell out a few thousand dollars for a tilt-shift lens for a 35mm-size camera — so that buildings that are tilting back can be straightened up, primarily for serious architectural photography.

Rather than aim the camera up at Nicole and the building I shifted the lens.

Compare this to panel 2 where I aimed the camera up instead: the building tilts back.

Here I was using the tilt-shift lens, but set it to normal lens position.

Here I took the image from panel 2 and straightened up the building in computer, and it looks pretty good. So why spend the bucks for the tilt-shift lens? Maybe because you do serious architectural photography and you want to keep post-processing to a minimum. Or you shoot film and don't believe in computers.

Here the tilt property was used to throw the foreground out of focus, much more out of focus than you could get from a 24mm lens by shooting wide open. This is getting into similar territory as the lens baby.

Here is the other reason people are shooting with tilt-shift lenses: under certain conditions, you can make normal scenes look just like miniatures — easily more striking than this example.

The only problem with this approach is that is essentially a one-trick pony: how many times would anybody want to make a scene look like a toy scene?

Here is the "control" image: the same as panel 5, but with no lens tilt.

Note that the actual dollhouse scene below, shot with lots of depth of field, doesn't shout out "dollhouse" because it is all in focus.

Image courtesy of The Great American Dollhouse Museum.

Here the normal image from panel 6 was blurred in computer to give it that abnormally short depth of field.

Indicates to me that you can do this fairly well without a tilt-shift lens.

Below is an example of an actual dollhouse scene from The Great American Dollhouse Museum in Danville, Kentucky. Note that the lack of depth of field when using a wide angle lens DOES give it that dollhouse look.

A miniature look fail.

You can't make any old scene look miniature with the tilt-shift lens effect — it has to be a scene that the viewer can believe is a toy "set", in a box. Nicole does not look like a doll (in that sense).

Below, for comparison, are two actual dolls I photographed at the Great American Dollhouse in Kentucky. The shallow depth of field helps us see them as dolls, but mostly we see them as dolls because they ARE dolls.