Are wide angles viable when there's Tilt-Shift lenses out there (namely Samyang as they're cheap)?

I currently have a Nikon 16-35 f/4 VR, and I'm wondering if there are uses or situations where the wide angle lens could be more viable or useful than a tilt shift lens? I don't have tilt shift lens, but I'm pondering whether it would be good replacement for my 16-35 (landscape use), as the DOF can be wider, without having to stop aperture too much (apparently it can get wide DOF wide open too, depending on camera's height / lens tilt). This sounds very good, so why is it that often the wide angle lenses are recommended, when there's T-S lens maker Samyang who can make tilt-shifts cheaper than premium (or not-so-premium) wide angle lenses??

And there's of course the miniature effect, narrow DOF and perspective control too. But for the topic at hand, I'm more interested as to why ppl don't recommend a f3.5 lens with effective aperture of f16 (when tilted) over a "normal" wide angle lens that needs to be stopped down very much?

Lassoni said:

I currently have a Nikon 16-35 f/4 VR, and I'm wondering if there are uses or situations where the wide angle lens could be more viable or useful than a tilt shift lens? I don't have tilt shift lens, but I'm pondering whether it would be good replacement for my 16-35 (landscape use), as the DOF can be wider, without having to stop aperture too much (apparently it can get wide DOF wide open too, depending on camera's height / lens tilt). This sounds very good, so why is it that often the wide angle lenses are recommended, when there's T-S lens maker Samyang who can make tilt-shifts cheaper than premium (or not-so-premium) wide angle lenses??

And there's of course the miniature effect, narrow DOF and perspective control too. But for the topic at hand, I'm more interested as to why ppl don't recommend a f3.5 lens with effective aperture of f16 (when tilted) over a "normal" wide angle lens that needs to be stopped down very much?

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Viable? Umm yes. But they are totally different animals. A 16-35 zoom is much more versatile for general photography than a tilt/shift. If you are talking Nikon, (or Samyang for Nikon) their widest shift lens is a 24mm. For sure the PC-E 24 is a great lens, I have one, and it's the perfect tool for certain situations.

16mm is a lot wider than 24mm though. The 24 shift lens projects a larger image circle than regular lenses and by physically shifting the lens in any direction you can choose a 24mm frame of anywhere within that larger image circle. Which is very handy when you are shooting a vertical shot of a highrise building for instance. With an normal 24mm lens, you might have to tilt the camera back to fit everything in, which would result in the sides of the building converging at the top of the image, also called keystoning. In order for that not to happen you need to ensure the camera sensor is parallel to the face of the building. Now the sides of the building don't converge anymore but most of your frame is filled with the road in front and you haven't got the top of the building in anymore. If you had a shift lens on, provided that it's wide enough, all you then have to do is shift the end of the lens vertically to choose the upper part of the image circle, eliminating the unwanted road and filling the frame with the undistorted highrise.

That's pretty handy, as long as the 24 shift lens is appropriately wide for the given situation. You can sort of accomplish the same thing by using a wider lens also held parallel to the building plane but because it's wider you can actually include the whole building (plus the unwanted road) Then you can just crop out the road portion afterwards. You don't end up with as many pixels on the desired building but it does solve the converging verticals problem.

Shift lenses are typically manual focus and are more suited to methodical work on a tripod. (I'll now hear from a bunch of people that say they always shoot them hand held) and of course it's possible, but typically you don't use tilt shift lenses for hand held grab shots and especially the setting up of the tilt function to have fine control of the plane of focus requires precision best accomplished on a tripod.

Another neat trick of shift lenses is to shoot panoramas easily by combining two or three shots shifted full left, centre and full right. On a 24mm shift lens it gives you the equivalent width of about an 17mm but in a panorama format.

So the two types of lenses are quite different... and both viable.

Ming Thein has a great comparison review of the Nikon PC-E 24 vs the less expensive Samyang version. http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/09/01/tilt-shift-world-cup-24mm/

For more detail on the physics of tilt/shift than you maybe wanted, here's another great link. http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/tilt-shift-lenses2.htm

--
Michael Sherman
http://www.msphoto.ca

I noticed ming's article earlier, but I only gave glance at the images and didn't read it much, because a nikon pc-e is out of my price range

I'm still wondering though why the normal wide angle lenses get recommended for landscape photography, when tilt-shift should be able to pull the job better, and in case of handholding there's difference of many full stops. I think it may be of use for tripod landscape shots too, can use wider aperture + faster shutter speed. Maybe to capture some movement or to save time? Maybe very useful in night photography where you want to capture something that would otherwise require bulbing/longer shutter speeds.

Lassoni said:

I noticed ming's article earlier, but I only gave glance at the images and didn't read it much, because a nikon pc-e is out of my price range

I'm still wondering though why the normal wide angle lenses get recommended for landscape photography, when tilt-shift should be able to pull the job better, and in case of handholding there's difference of many full stops. I think it may be of use for tripod landscape shots too, can use wider aperture + faster shutter speed. Maybe to capture some movement or to save time? Maybe very useful in night photography where you want to capture something that would otherwise require bulbing/longer shutter speeds.

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If you are comparing a normal 24mm prime lens with a 24mm shift lens the the shift lens can do things that the prime lens can't however the prime lens is likely a faster aperture and has autofocus. Unshifted, the Nikon PC-E is a beautifully sharp 24mm but also fairly pricey.

If you are comparing the shift lens with your 16-35, the obvious advantages of the 16-36 are it's wider, you have the much greater versatility of a much larger focal range plus it has VR.

The specific benefit of the t/s that you mention, the ability to use faster shutter speeds with increased depth of field is nice but not something I personally ever use. Maybe if you want to avoid motion blur shooting a field of flowers on a windy day with everything in focus. Not really going to save you any time though as it takes a while to set up the tilt correctly to achieve perfect focus and depth of field.

Another thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is that these days some of the T/S effects like the selective blur and miniature effects can be applied to non t/s images by using the digital filter effects like T/S blur in Photoshop CS6 for example. Or to achieve limitless depth of field in your images you can use focus stacking.

Lassoni said:

I noticed ming's article earlier, but I only gave glance at the images and didn't read it much, because a nikon pc-e is out of my price range

I'm still wondering though why the normal wide angle lenses get recommended for landscape photography, when tilt-shift should be able to pull the job better, and in case of handholding there's difference of many full stops. I think it may be of use for tripod landscape shots too, can use wider aperture + faster shutter speed. Maybe to capture some movement or to save time? Maybe very useful in night photography where you want to capture something that would otherwise require bulbing/longer shutter speeds.

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I think that nailing the tilt and thereby being able to maximise the depth of field without going into diffraction territory, is where Tilt shilt lenses have the edge on standard lenses.

Here is the 45mm pc-e:


and here is a 24 pc-e


and for completeness here is a 85 pc example


All shot at f9.5 on a D800e. I modified the lenses so that the tilt is on the same axis as the shift.

I tilt the lens, and also the camera, then is use the shift to frame the shot.

I mount the lens to the tripod so that the lens is fixed, but the camera can still shift. I tilt the lens, and also the camera to achieve the desired angle of the focal plane, then I use the shift to frame the shot. I can combine this set up with a single row pano head and go much wider in a conventional way.


I use filters a lot, all these lenses take filters. Its takes alot more time to take a shot with these lenses, and is by no means as convenient as auto focus lens. There is also a learning curve, these days I carry a laser tape measure/inclinometer and self-written spreadsheet on a tablet. I can pretty much nail things without chimping now. This wasn't the case in the early days.

I hope this helps you.

Beautiful work Phil. Great images.

Tilt lenses can tilt the plane of sharp focus. They don't make it wider. If you also want that tilted plane to be wide then you would stop the lens down just like you do with other lenses.

But since it can tilt the plane of focus, I assume that there are going to be situations where you can get objects from foreground and background in focus (with the lens wide open), depending on the scene and how the camera tilt/lens tilt are in relation to the scene. Something I think isn't possible with a regular lens at a wide aperture.

What I'm trying to get at is, it should be possible to get shots with either less noise or faster shutter speeds, if the aperture is "not as closed" as it would have been if the lens was normal. And then there's diffraction too if a lens is stopped down too much.

Lassoni said:

But since it can tilt the plane of focus, I assume that there are going to be situations where you can get objects from foreground and background in focus (with the lens wide open), depending on the scene and how the camera tilt/lens tilt are in relation to the scene. Something I think isn't possible with a regular lens at a wide aperture.

What I'm trying to get at is, it should be possible to get shots with either less noise or faster shutter speeds, if the aperture is "not as closed" as it would have been if the lens was normal. And then there's diffraction too if a lens is stopped down too much.

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Yes, that is it, manipulation of the angle of the focal plane, can be used to bring more areas of an image into focus at a larger aperture.

I have mainly used this to achieve front to back focus for landscape photography from a tripod and so a fast shutter speed wasn't the goal. Here you would choose an aperture to exclude diffraction but not neccesarily a large aperture.

In the past, I have used a pre-focussed tilt and shift lens hand-held, wide open, for the side-on shot during greyhound racing. This happens in the evening, and flash photography is forbidden. This is to achieve a very fast shutterspeed. This can be done theoretically at least at a greater depth of field/lower iso combination than a standard lens. A few fun evenings spent with somewhat limited success.

If you are only going to use shift then with a small loss of MP (which may or may not be important) using a slightly wider angle lens with the subject parallel to the sensor or PhotoShop (or similar) is viable.

You have a greater choice of angles of view with wide angles and you can often do a generally better job than shift in isolation with PhotoShop distortion control.

There is no direct alternative to shift, other thank focus stacking which may or may not suite the subject and shooting conditions.

The Samyang are inexpensive though Roger Circla, from the hire company perspective, has described them as disposable lenses. Whether this applies to current lenses I do not know though a Pro I know is using a Samyang to good effect on a Sony body.

Leonard Shepherd said:

There is no direct alternative to shift, other thank focus stacking which may or may not suite the subject and shooting conditions.

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Leonard, can you explain what shift hast to do with focus stacking? I suspect that you've got your terms confused once again. Your statement makes more sense if you are talking about tilt.

mikemsphoto said:

Leonard Shepherd said:

There is no direct alternative to shift, other thank focus stacking which may or may not suite the subject and shooting conditions.

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I suspect that you've got your terms confused once again.

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Sounds like it

This from Wiki: "Tilt–shift photography is the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes the term is used when the large depth of field is simulated with digital post-processing; the name may derive from the tilt–shift lens normally required when the effect is produced optically.

"Tilt–shift" 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 adjust the position of the subject in the image area without moving the camera back; this is often helpful in avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings."















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mikemsphoto said:

Leonard, can you explain what shift hast to do with focus stacking?

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I agree I should have referred to tilt not shift.

Ok this works but with one big caveat... Dof is proportional to distance, therefore when utilising the tilt you have to remember how this affects object close to the camera. See the first diagram in this tutorial:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/focusing-ts.shtml

Effectively what happens is your zone of dof becomes wedge shaped and the upshot of this is that you may be able to take a shot of a beach and keep it in focus, but you will have very limited "height" of focus for any object near the camera. So a tree in the foreground may be in focus at it's base but not at the top. As you tilt your lens down you are also tilting the dof away from the top "foreground" of your image.

--
http://timtuckerphoto.smugmug.com/

yes, am aware of the wedge.

There are things you can do with a wide-angle that you can't with a TS lens, and things you can do with a TS that you can't do with a wide-angle lens !

;-)

Photo Galleries at http://www.pbase.com/scherrer
Spherical Panoramas at http://www.360cities.net/profile/jps

JP Scherrer said:

There are things you can do with a wide-angle that you can't with a TS lens

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Unless the TS lens is a wide angle model. There is an exclusion but it's not that. TS lenses will be generally slower to handle and as far as I know there hasn't been an autofocus model yet.

To the OP: It's probably fair to say that in the situations where a TS lens is a reasonable fit, there are cases where a non TS lens may be able to stand in but it will have to have a shorter focal length. You can keep the camera level and then crop later to simulate a shift. The downside is that you lose a great deal of the pixels, so for the same subject coverage there is a significantly reduced resolution.

Lassoni said:

I noticed ming's article earlier, but I only gave glance at the images and didn't read it much, because a nikon pc-e is out of my price range

I'm still wondering though why the normal wide angle lenses get recommended for landscape photography, when tilt-shift should be able to pull the job better,

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Cheaper, smaller, lighter, much more straightforward to handle, and most people aren't pushing that hard against technical limits where it's worth it (to them) to put up with the practical disadvantages of TS.

Lassoni said:

and in case of handholding there's difference of many full stops.

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TS lenses end up not being used handheld very often because of the setup. At least that's true for the tilt function when you're trying to match the focal plane to the subject plane. That's not so easy when the camera isn't locked down. It can be done but few try.

Lassoni said:

I think it may be of use for tripod landscape shots too, can use wider aperture + faster shutter speed. Maybe to capture some movement or to save time? Maybe very useful in night photography where you want to capture something that would otherwise require bulbing/longer shutter speeds.

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I think you're describing a minority case inside a niche. You'll only get a couple of stops so long streaks will just become medium streaks. Sure, in principle you'll be able to get some benefit but it won't often be a game changer.

Thanks for clearing this up for me a little bit, you worded it very nicely. I think I'm going to wait and see what the tamron 15-30 is going to be like. It sounds like an attractive package, with the VC and 2.8.