A while back I got my hands on my first tilt-shift lens. Since then I have carried it with me nearly every day, grocery shopping and subway riding – you name it. It’s quite a special and fascinating piece of glass even having aged 43 years.
We've shared in the past how a broken lens can be used for "freelensing," or taking tilt-shift-esque photographs.
Photographer and lens hacker Witono Halim did this by buying a broken 50mm f/1.8 online for $25, sawing a piece off, and combining everything into a ugly-yet-functional lens with $2 of duct tape.
Tilt-shift lenses are nothing short of optical magic... or so it seems. But as their namesake implies, they actually achieve this 'magic' through the use of two clever movements in the lens.
In the short tutorial above, Vincent Laforet, a Canon Explorer of Light and well-known photography educator, explains just how those two components work and how they dramatically impact the look of an image.
When it comes to DIY tilt-shift, there are a few different options out there, but none of them that we've seen are quite as impressive and practical as this 3D printed method from Instructables user Cpt.Insano.
Tilt-shift images can be made one of two ways: one is to capture them in-camera using a tilt-shift lens, and the other is to create the effect in post-production by using a clever blurring technique.
One isn't necessarily better than the other -- each has its own time and place -- but more often than not, creating the effect in post-production is the most convenient (read: cheapest) method.
We're not sure how most of the world missed this time-lapse for the first 10 months of its existence, but we're thrilled it finally made it onto our radar. Put together by writer/director Sean Collins of Bodhi Films, it's his "tribute to the beautiful city of Boston" -- and it rocks.
Put together by Aussie photographer Filippo Rivetti for Expedia, ‘Tiny Sydney’ is an incredibly beautiful tilt-shift time-lapse captured around the New South Wales capital (not the Australian capital... that's Canberra), Sydney.
From Jay P. Morgan of The Slanted Lens comes an educational and behind the scenes video out of Yanks Air Museum in Chino, California. Throughout the video, Morgan gives insight into the process of using a tilt-shift lens and shares some nice background information on how a tilt-shift lens actually works.
Photographs of galaxies far far away rarely convey just how large what you're looking at really is -- after all, how can you even fathom something that is measured in light years across. But these photos of the cosmos do an even worse job. By applying the tilt-shift effect in post, these photos show galaxies and nebulae look like they could fit comfortably in the palm of your hand.
We don't typically share two time-lapses in the same day, since most people see that genre as over-saturated as it is, but today we have good reason to. The first is a landscape time-lapse so gorgeous National Geographic took notice, and this one, well this one may completely change the way you look at tilt-shift where time-lapse is concerned.
Getting your camera noticed if it's not also a smartphone or a high-end shooter is getting harder by the day. And phones such as the newly announced Galaxy S4 Zoom are quickly shrinking the quality gap between the camera phone and the regular old camera.
So, in order to stand out, Bonzart decided to create something completely different. Their Ampel camera is an affordable, not-quite-toy, retro-styled, twin lens camera with the ability to shoot real tilt-shift photos and videos built right in.
Relics of the Future is a short documentary that follows Toronto-based fine art photographer Toni Hafkenscheid as he explores the world of once-futuristic architecture through his tilt-shift lens. In the 1960's, these buildings and monuments were considered "visions of the future;" now they stand, as one interviewee put it, "on that fence between futuristic and nostalgic."
New York-based photographer Richard Silver is a passionate traveler, and his primary goal as an artist is to share his life experiences by creating beautiful photographs during his travels. Rather than shoot traditional photos, he uses techniques such as tilt shift, HDR, panorama, and time-slice in order to capture the world in eye-catching ways. Last year we shared his time-slice photos of NYC, which showed day turning into night in single photos.
Another major project he has been working on is called "Tilt Shift." He has been photographing some of the world's most famous locations and turning them into miniature scenes.
The rumor mill is churning regarding Canon's tilt-shift lens lineup. The company will reportedly be announcing replacements to its two oldest TS-E lenses by the end of this year, and the lenses are likely already floating around in the wild for real world field tests.
Freelensing is a relatively inexpensive way of getting the similarly unique effect of an expensive tilt-shift lens, where the focus plane is thrown out of whack with the added bonus of natural light leaks. No, this isnt anything new, and the look that an expensive tilt-shift lens gives has been around for a while, but I wanted to share with you my experience with it and how I did it.
The Birth of a Pond video above was shot by photographer James Breen over a three week period as he watched a construction crew create a pond from scratch in the Fall of 2009. To be fair, he didn't catch the entire "birthing" process, the final scene was captured a year after the pond was completed (allowing it enough time to fill naturally) but the video is still quite mesmerizing to watch.
In their most recent "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera" challenge, DigitalRev managed to get world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet to participate. Known best, perhaps, for his tilt-shift work, Laforet was asked to trade in his 1D X and 45mm tilt-shift lens for a Canon A2e and Lensbaby composer.
Freelensing. It’s been around for a while. It’s essentially the “poor man’s tilt shift.” All the technique requires is disconnecting a lens from the camera body and floating it around in front of your sensor to shift the focal plane in weird directions. It takes practice to get accurate with it, but overall the technique is pretty straightforward.
I wanted to take it a bit further.
Watch out Lensbaby. A recently published Olympus patent (No. 2012-199834) suggests that the Japanese camera company may be developing a selective-focus tilt lens of its own. The patent describes a technique for compensating for the "color shift" and image degradation that occur when using a tilt lens.
"Entry level" is a huge theme in the photo gear industry this year, and it's not limited to cameras. Lensbaby has also joined in on the action by announcing its new Spark lens. It's stripped-down plastic version of the company's selective focus lenses, allowing you to shoot fun "tilt-shift"-style photos without breaking the bank.