Tilt-Shifting the World
Posted February 21, 2013 at 3:33 pm in beach, california, San Francisco Bay Area, tilt-shift
About a month ago, one of my beau’s friends came to visit, and I took the inevitable redwoods hike we went on as a chance to rent and try out one of Nikon’s PC-E lenses, the 85mm tilt-shift, the results of which you can see in this post! Click on through!
The tilt-shift effect has really blown up in the wedding world in the past couple years – you’ll see images with the bridal couple in focus, but the tops and bottoms of the photo are all blurred. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t take a look at one of my photographic heroes’ posts here. I was inspired to rent the lens by reading about Ryan Brenizer’s experience – like me, he was very skeptical of the tilt effect. I’ve always thought it looked gimmicky and is all too often used to cover up shoddy photography, but like everything, after playing with the lens, I realize that it has its place. Tilt-shift is also famous for its miniaturization effect, which you can see in the vertical photos at the end of this post!
To get an idea of what tilt-shift does, with your EYES (total hands-on learner here!) instead of your brains, please see the comparison below of a “cave” according to the signs we read (kind of just seemed like a bumpy rock wall to me). While I was shooting wide open, at f/2.8, because I was facing the wall relatively flat on and at close range, the whole wall appears to be in focus despite the shallow depth of field. In the 2nd photo, I tilted the lens, changing the plane of focus, and bringing half the wall into focus, while the other half falls off. It isolates a particular point and turns an otherwise ordinary photograph into something more interesting.
For the more photography minded, my experience with tilt-shift is not limited to this rental. If you go back in my posts, you can catch an occasional photo where I risked what’s called “free lensing.” You remove the lens from the camera and swivel it around over the sensor, focusing manually – the downside is that while it’s a cheap way to tilt, it gets your sensor insanely dirty, and holding the camera in one hand and trying to tilt and focus with the other is relatively difficult. The experience of working with a lens actually designed to tilt is amazingly simple by comparison. Nikon vs Canon lovers will know that Canon lenses also hold the advantage over Nikon. I found Nikon’s ability to tilt in only one plane extremely limiting. Obviously, it’s easy to learn and work with, but if you want a horizontal image tilted vertically, you’re out of luck without sending your lens in to be permanently altered.
While I can see this being applicable to my photography, I wasn’t so blown away by the portraits it produced to think it justified the cost – I didn’t even get any portraits I wanted to put up here! Mostly, I was awed by the effect on the landscape. The way the lens isolates the large cliffs, and causes the whole scene to take on a dreamy, otherworldly effect, is really seductive to my eye, but sometimes, I think it’s just nice to see what’s actually there, you know?
Does anyone else out there have any thoughts on tilt-shifting? Do you even like the wedding photos you see that obviously use it?
I think tilt-shift can be overused, but it has its place in any photographer’s arsenal. If everything is tilt-shift, it can be a bit much.
I still remember the photo that blew me away and alerted me to tilt-shift in the first place–it was a woman sitting in tall grass, and only the tips of the grass and the woman were in focus.
Also, tilt-shift time-lapses are hilarious to watch.
I remember that Uniqlo put together a whole set of tilt-shift time lapses in Japan for some kind of promotional idea. I hope you saw that!