Tilt-Shift Photography

By admin Thursday August 13, 2009

What is Tilt-Shift Photography?

Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small and medium format cameras; it usually requires the use of special lenses.
“Tilt-shift” actually encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to change the line of sight while avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings. In many cases, “tilt-shift photography” refers to the use of tilt and a large aperture to achieve a very shallow depth of field.

How Tilt-Shift Photography Works?

Shift(rise and fall)
shift
In a subject plane parallel to the image plane, parallel lines in the subject remain parallel in the image. If the image plane is not parallel to the subject, as when pointing a camera up to photograph a tall building, parallel lines converge, and the result sometimes appears unnatural, such as a building that appears to be leaning backwards. Shift is a movement of the lens parallel to the image plane that allows the line of sight to be changed while keeping the image plane (and thus focus) parallel to the subject; it can be used to photograph a tall building while keeping the sides of the building parallel. The lens can also be shifted in the opposite direction and the camera tilted up to accentuate the convergence for artistic effect.

Lenses designed for shifting have a much wider field of vision than a standard lens of the same focal length. Whereas the image frame fits tightly in a standard lens, the shifting lens has an imaging area many times wider. Shifting the lens allows different portions of the image circle to be cast onto the sensor plane, similar to cropping an area along the edge of an image.

Again, view camera users usually distinguish between vertical movements (rise and fall) and lateral movements (shift or cross), while small- and medium-format users often refer to both types of movements as “shift”.
Tilt(swing)
tilt
On a regular camera, the image plane (containing the film or image sensor), lens plane, and object plane are parallel, and objects in sharp focus are all at the same distance from the camera. When the lens plane is tilted relative to the image plane, the plane of focus (PoF) is at an angle to the image plane, and objects at different distances from the camera can all be sharply focused if they lie on a straight line. With the lens tilted, the image plane, lens plane, and PoF intersect at a common line; this behavior has become known as the Scheimpflug principle.

When the PoF coincides with an essentially flat subject, the entire subject is sharp; in applications such as landscape photography, getting everything sharp is often the objective.

The PoF can also be oriented so that only a small part of it passes through the subject, producing a very shallow region of sharpness, and the effect is quite different from that obtained simply by using a large aperture with a regular camera. It can be used to make a large scene appear much smaller, as the shallow depth of field is similar to that achieved by a macro lens on miniature subjects.

View camera users usually distinguish between rotating the lens about a horizontal axis (tilt), and rotation about a vertical axis (swing); small- and medium-format camera users often refer to either rotation as “tilt”.

Tilt and Shift

How to make tilt-shift photos

To make real tilt-shift photos, you must have a special lens which can cost 1000$(PC-E Nikkor 24mm f/3.5D ED, Canon TS-E 24mm… or you can create your own tilt-shift lense). To learn how to use tilt-shift lense, you can watch this video: Using a tilt shift lens

Another, less cost-intensive technique called “tilt-shift miniature faking” is a process in which a photograph of a life-sized location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature-scale model.

Another way that won’t cost you a penny is creating faked tilt-shift photographs. You can make tilt-shift photo using Photoshop. Or you can to multimap.com and search for a place name or postcode. Click on the “Bird’s Eye” button and position the camera icon over the area you want to view. Hide the road labels by clicking on the little arrow next to the Bird’s Eye button and choosing “Road Labels Off”. Capture a screengrab (ALT-PrtSrc on a PC or CMD-Shift-3 on a Mac) and paste the file into Photoshop or a similar image editing application. Crop it and save the picture somewhere. Go to tiltshiftmaker.com and upload the picture you saved. Use the slider to choose the area of the image you’d like to be in sharp focus. Click preview to see what the final result will look like. When you’re happy with the result, click “Get full size” and save your fake tilt-shift photos. Done!

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