Just like Mark I was in Winchester Cathedral at the end of November (and the Hospital of St Cross). I was experimenting with a rented 24mm Canon tilt/shift lens. I wonder what members think about any virtues of such a lens (£200 to rent for 3 days, £1800 to buy) when compared with fixing perspective in Lightroom. Certainly there is a loss of data in post-processing, and you have to anticipate what will be lost, which can be tricky at the margins. Are there any downsides other than cost. It certainly slowed me down, but that may have been a good thing.
Hi Brian,
Really pleased to see other photographers perspectives on how to shoot the cathedral at Winchester. Your shots are fantastic!
I’ve never used a tilt shift lens and would love to try - a whole new skill to be learnt, I fear! Lol
Lightroom does a good job of fixing perspective, but it’s a pain to get it perfect or to an acceptable level. It certainly seemed worth it to rent the tilt shift first before investing that level of money, like anything it will, of course, come down to how much use you can get out of it. Personally, I’m on the fence, although still intrigued!
Once again, great shots and thank you for referencing back to my captures too, appreciate it :-)
Have a great day.
Mark
Great images, Brian! Particularly like your toning. You create an airy atmosphere with a real sense of space..
I don't do much architectural photography, but am seriously considering the Nikon 19mm equivalent for landscapes, partly to manage DOF using swing rather than focus-stacking, but mainly because I'm sick of converging verticals if I shoot a landscape with a lot of sky. Trees, and electricity poles slope inwards, waterfcraft look distorted, and so on. I like to get everything more or less right at the time of shooting, and I suspect this gives better compositions and cohesion in images, because the concept is there in toto from the start.
Downsides I can see are cost, 900g weight, and the fragility of that front element in the field when it is so exposed on an already cumbersome lens..
Thanks both for kind comments. On cost, assuming you have the money in the first place, having borrowed once I'd debating buying. If one assumes that it will retain half its cost in re-sale value, I'd only have to rent it about 9 times before I'd have been better off buying one.
Re Chris's kind comments on tone, I feel like I'm in a running battle with lighting engineers who seem to want to create weird lighting effects in ancient monuments. I understand that we need light so people don't fall over stuff, but surely it is possible to light a building without always being aware of the light source and artificially bright areas contrasting starkly with areas of darkness. And I haven't even got started on the colour of lights (hence the B&W).
Excellent work. I am guessing they permitted a tripod in the Cathedral?
I use a 17TS-E for my architecture work. It made a smoking hole in my wallet but was well worth it and paid for itself on the first two jobs.
It is slower to use and I often need a slight touch up in post but the quality is inarguable. I pair it with a 1.4 TC to make a low cost 24 TS and get brilliant results, albeit with the loss of one stop of speed but as I am usually shooting at f8 it is not an issue.
I do use it off tripod on occasion but the tripod is much better.
I also purchased the 11-24 zoom as I am often in situations where I need speed. If I don't need much perspective correction it works splendidly. Perspective correction makes a minimal impact on IQ in my experience but as noted it can be hard to anticipate what losses will be incurred at the edges. It is best used in those situations where action stopping at a wide angle is needed when a stitched panorama won't do.
Thank you for your encouraging comments. Yes, they didn't object to a tripod at all.
That was my question too. They didn't allow tripods when I visited 15 years ago.
The 24mm TS-E is my favorite lens and I couldn't do my work without it — even with the abilities within PS and Lightroom. But I've never thought about traveling with it.
I love how the manual focus and shift adjustments slow me down and make me think about the photo I'm taking.
Indy Thomas, any thoughts on the quality of pairing the 17tse with a 1.4 tc? Thinking of doing just that, but the tc isn't particularly cheap... wondering if there's anything of a compromise (and yes, I prefer f8/11 with my 17mm as well)
I am very happy with the 1.4 TC IQ. I use it with my 5DsR and my new R5 and it is excellent. Bear in mind that the criticism of the 17 is the faint softness at the edges on an extreme shift. The TC uses the center of the image circle and thus the edge image issue is reduced to insignificance.
I can see almost no degradation of the image in the final output. Canon's TC is superb.
If you wish to really test the proposition I would suggest renting the TC if possible.
So as a guy who used to shoot 4X5 prior to the DSLR/digital phase I have to ask what I'm missing.
On a view camera, the back determines the parallax and whether things will converge or be straight (barrel distortion aside). The objective plane (the lens) determines the plane of focus.
If you're shooting a cathedral, you would compose, then make the back parallel to the vertical lines to keep them parallel and so that they don't keystone. Then the front plane is adjusted to be sure that top to bottom and side to side are in focus. You can also shift up/down/left/right to recompose once you get the space straight.
On a T/S lens, the shift is still there and that's all well and good. The tilting is what has me completely mystified. All you're changing is the plane of focus, no? Yes, there may be a slight adjustment to distortion, but with it comes a dramatic adjustment to focus, no?
As an NPS member, I have used the Nikon t/s lenses and it seems to me that they are great for creative focus situations and the shifting is handy to have, but as an architectural lens, they are pretty worthless without a back that can correspondingly adjust.
I look forward to hearing other input.
I'm absolutely not an expert on T/S Lenses. I rented one for a few days, and I'm going to give it another go in the New Year. I follow and agree with most of what you say.
As far as the shift bit is concerned, I would not agree that it is 'pretty worthless' for architecture. If photographing a cathedral interior with a SLR and a standard wide angle lens you have two choices:
1. Tilt the camera up in order to include the top of the building, thus introducing converging verticals; or
2. keep the camera level (i.e. perpendicular to the floor), and end up with a photo that does not include the top of the building but does include a large expanse of the floor.
The shift lens allows you to compose your picture with the camera level and to then shift the lens up to reduce the amount of floor in the frame and include more of the upper part of the building, but without the converging verticals.
On my first hiring of this lens I restricted most of what I did to working in this manner with the shift function. I did not use the tilt function at all, other that to mess about a bit.
My understanding of the tilt function agrees with yours. What you are doing is tilting the plane of focus. BUT, on thinking about it later it occurred to me that perhaps this could also be useful in a cathedral. Imagine photographing a cathedral by placing your tripod at the west (door) end, but to one side and taking a diagonal photo of the other side of the Cathedral elevation. In order to get the whole arcade (from west to east) in focus you would need a small aperture to maximise the depth of field and that would involve a long exposure. But if you tilted the lens horizontally so that the plane of focus was closer to being parallel with the arcade, then the depth of field would more easily include the entire elevation from that closest to you to that at the other end of the cathedral. This is just a thought experiment, I'll try it next week.
UPDATE. Two images attached. Not a cathedral but my local parish church. These were literally the first two images I took when the lens arrived. The first shows a view across the church before applying the shift the second is with the shift applied.
Just to clarify what I'm thinking about the tilt lens in the cathedral. See the very crude diagram attached. The cathedral plan is represented by the rectangle. The columns by the small circles. With the camera positioned at the bottom of the drawing and the view through the lens represented by the pink triangle. With a normal lens the plane of focus would be parallel to the film or sensor. If you tilt the lens horizontally to the left, then the plane of focus could be represented by the green line, thus making it easier to get all the columns in focus. Am I talking gibberish?
@ Brian O'Callaghan.
The swings afforded with a TS lens would allow you to do just as you say. However, it is rarely done as the TS lenses are generally wide angle and on FF sensors which allow a great deal of depth of focus already.
On a 4x5 or larger the tilt/swing would be more useful as the DOF is desperately shallow and the apertures (f32 or 45 ) to achieve a useful DOF would result in very long exposures that may be undesirable.
I use a Canon 17TS-E and have used the tilt function on occasion and it was far more trouble than the faint benefit yielded.
The other problem is that one might forget to move the lens back to the zero point on a tilt as it is so infrequently used (speaking from experience). A non-zeroed shift is harmless.
Stupendous shots!
(Always wanted to try out one of those lenses).
Hi Brian. I Never used Tilt shift Lense.
But once I discussed my problem (inability) of taking pano for a high ceiling space. The forum suggested for a title shift Lense. An example was shared of horizontal pano which had very good details including perspective correction. not pp.
I Gauss more clarity would come with practice for your your goal of frames you want to capture. have seen beautiful pano images mostly vertical and few horizontal of such gothic churches.
for me, its in my bucket list for sure.