John Kung

An example of the tilt/shift miniature effect.

One of the things that got lost with the popularity of 35mm and medium format cameras is something called “camera movements”. If you’re scratching your head at “camera movements”, you probably know what I’m talking about, but know it under a different name: tilt/shift lenses.

The “tilting” and “shifting” in a tilt/shift lens are two of the five available camera movements, the other three being “rise” (shifting up), “fall” (shifting down), and “swing” (basically the same as tilting, except from side to side rather than up and down).

(I should note that you have access to all five different movements with a TS lens, just not all at the same time.)

If you’ve heard of the tilt/shift phenomenon then you know all about the effect, the way it makes everything look like miniatures. The first I came across this effect was a book by Japanese photographer Naoki Honjo called Small Planet, but I think it really hit the mainstream with Sydney photographer Keith Loutit’s “Small Worlds” series of short films showing Sydney in TS miniature. Since then one of my favourite sites featuring this kind of work is Japanese clothing company Uniqlo’s Calendar.

While the miniature effect is fun, what really intrigues me is the possibility of controlling depth of field and the zone of focus relatively independent of aperture. To that end I recently invested in a Nikon PC-E 45mm f/2.8 tilt/shift lens, and it has been a revelation to have the kind of control I can get from my view camera.

With this image I used a swing to put the focus just on the centre of the frame, leaving the areas on each side out of focus. Click to see the full size image.

The Nikon PC-E 45mm tilt/shift is the latest iteration from Nikon, with a built-in electronic aperture (meaning you can control it from the camera rather than having to manually open and close the aperture before each shot) and the latest and greatest glass and lens coating technologies. It is also a macro lens, capable of focusing down to 0.253m with 1/2x reproduction. It is also very good at infinity, which isn’t something a lot of macro lenses are good at (since macro lenses are built for macro photography!) I chose the 45mm because it gives me the flexibility of being able to shoot both portraits and landscapes, which suits me better than the 24mm or the 85mm tilt/shift lenses. It’s a big lens, with necessarily bulky mechanisms and is manual focus. The focus ring is large and very smooth, quite heavy to pull but very good for minute adjustments and doesn’t move once you let it go.

One thing that has become very obvious is that there’s some misalignment in my viewfinder; something that looks focused in the viewfinder comes out blurry in the file, but when focused in live view it is sharp. This is because there’s a tiny difference in the length of the path light entering the lens travels to the ground glass verses the sensor, which results in a small difference in focus. The autofocus system seems to work ok though, so I use the indicators when I can to help me find correct focus through the viewfinder. I’ve also purchased a magnifying eyepiece, that should help me focus as well.

(Autofocus with a manual lens? Well, the autofocus system can’t drive the lens obviously, but on Nikons there’s a small green dot that lights up on the left hand side of the viewfinder display to tell you when the AF system thinks its focused. Just shift the sensor to when you want to focus, focus to roughly correct and check for the green dot.)

Another quirk is at close focusing distances the lens shifts its aperture range by almost a full stop, running from f/3.8 to f/43 (rather than f/2.8 to f/32). I’m not sure if the lens is automatically compensating for magnification factor (in large format it’s called the “bellows factor”, where you must compensate for lost light if the length of the bellows is longer than the length of the lens), but adjusting shutter speed to account for the stopping down have yielded consistent captures.

In practical usage this lens will test your abilities and stamina. Shooting close to the subject and wide open (which I like to do for portraiture) it shows a very thin depth of field, and a little bit of unanticipated movement or clumsy focusing will result in a blurry shot. And it is heavy, but because it is manual focus your left hand can’t be purely a support, so I find I need to hold the camera tighter in my right hand to compensate. Which is fine for a short period of time but I think an hour of shooting hand held would be my limit. But really this is a tripod lens, if you really need to shoot handheld the much much cheaper 50mm f/1.4 or the rock bottom 50mm f/1.8 is a much better option. That said, even with a tripod it would be advisable to check each shot for good focus, especially when tilted.

Quibbles aside there are lots of things I like about this lens. I really love the way it renders out of focus areas, such a great transition from focused to out of focus — it’s almost as if the image melts away from the point of focus, very nice indeed. And the colour rendition is particularly punchy, I think more so than my AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8, another lens I absolutely adore. And I like the way it feels, I’m finding with a bit of careful consideration I shoot almost as quickly hand held with this as any of my AF lenses, even with tilts. If you want to know how I work with tilts, read this post!