All About Tilt Shift Lenses

Gear  •  Photography Tips

Out of all the different types of lenses out there, the tilt shift lens must be the most interesting one. If you’re aware of it, you may know that it’s mostly used in architecture photography. And there’s a pretty good reason for it. However, the usage is not limited to architecture photography. If you’re wondering what makes the tilt shift lens so special, here we have Thio Joe who explains everything that you need to know:

A tilt shift lens is not at all a general purpose lens that you can use on a daily basis. But, you can get quite interesting results using it. What’s interesting about this lens is that you can shift the lens top-down, or right-left, and also tilt the plane of focus.

With the tilt feature, your plane of focus isn’t limited to being parallel to the sensor. You can move the plane of focus around in any direction as needed. This creates a really interesting miniature effect which can yield great results when used creatively.

And thanks to the really large image circle formed by these lenses, you can even shift the lens around that effectively shifts the image on the circle. Even if you shift the lens by a few millimeters, it translates to an effect that’s the equivalent of moving the camera by multiple feet. Because of this feature, we can get rid of the converging lines when photographing tall architectural structures.

Have you ever worked with a tilt shift lens? What’s the most interesting feature you like about it?