Venus Optics announce the new Laowa 15mm f/4.5 Zero-D Shift Lens – World’s Widest Shift Lens for Full Frame Cameras

[stevelee]

My only experience with a TS lens was the 90 TS-E I bought for product photography. I ended up realizing it wasn't wide enough, It wasn't practical to get back further from my light table and I did not want the 50mm.

I had fun earlier in the year when I rented the 24mm and later the 17mm TS-E lenses. I may rent the 24mm again some day. It seemed more useful and a little less quirky. I can't really justify owning one for the amount of use it would get. I liked doing big panoramas in which I shifted the lens to maximum at each 30º of rotation and then stitched together 17 or so images. The result was something like 87MP and the field of view of what, a 10mm lens? If I try that again, I'll also take shots rotated at 45º to fill in the corners. Rotation stops are at 30º, but it should be usable in between. I also did a poor man's Ansel Adams with the tilt, subbing a small fountain down the street for a Yosemite waterfall. I also tried the tilt with extension tubes, shifting the plane of focus to fake more depth of field with macro shots. I can see how a TS-E macro could be good for product shots.

 

[Sporgon]

Wow! Very interesting.

I have been enjoying messing around with a 24mm Samyang tilt-shif I have. I wish someone would make one in that price range at the 50mm focal length. Maybe someday these guys will get in that market.

-Brian

Voila !


(Apologies to the purists for corrupting a 15mm thread )

Fotodiox TS adapter for Pentax 67 to EF - about $190. The Pentax 67 55mm f/4 lens was one of the sharpest they made for that format, really good in the FF middle of the image circle. I've had this one since my MF film days, but I see you can get them out of Japan for about $200. So you could assess the effects of 50mm tilt for about $390, and do away with the image degrading effects of very small apertures on 50 mp. (That doesn't exist ).

A couple of caveats; the tilt on the Fotodiox is a little clunky compared with a TS-E lens. (OK, it's very clunky). Also the edges of the image circle really can't do justice to the modern FF digital, so if using it for shift, rise, fall etc the results are way inferior to the Canon one. But for this money you can find out if you really like what is does before splashing out on the very expensive, but superb Canon one.

Oh yes, one other thing. It's important to get the mark III version of the lens, the one from 1989 onwards and looks like the picture above, as it is much better than the first two versions.

 

[flip314]

How much better is actual tilt than perspective correction in Photoshop? Obviously you will lose some quality from stretching and squashing pixels, but how much does it really matter?

 

[stevelee]

How much better is actual tilt than perspective correction in Photoshop? Obviously you will lose some quality from stretching and squashing pixels, but how much does it really matter?

Perspective control is usually more a matter of shifts than tilts. I think Photoshop does more squashing than stretching, but you can control that in camera raw, where I do the perspective adjustments. If you still have enough pixels for your output after the squash, then it doesn’t make much difference.

It makes more difference in stitching panoramas in my experience.

Either beats all to pieces what I did in the darkroom, setting something under one end of the easel and dodging the end of the paper nearer the enlarger lens.

 

[hne]

How much better is actual tilt than perspective correction in Photoshop? Obviously you will lose some quality from stretching and squashing pixels, but how much does it really matter?

Walking around in a city, the TS-E 24mm on full shift lets you frame a building that you'd otherwise need a 16-35mm zoom for. Except with the UWA zoom you'd either at 16-17mm have the street cover close to 50% of your pixels or point your camera upwards so much at closer to 24mm that perspective correction throws away 25% of your pixels.

From my point of view, any lens wider than 24mm that doesn't allow for shift is a gimmick.

 

[dilbert]

How much better is actual tilt than perspective correction in Photoshop? Obviously you will lose some quality from stretching and squashing pixels, but how much does it really matter?

When you apply perspective correction in software, the software has to either remove detail or invent detail. It uses mathematical algorithms to guess what should happen.

When you use tilt/shift, there's less of a need to use softwre to invent new pixels or to take away pixels.