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Question about DIY tilt-shift lens

Started Mar 29, 2020 | Questions thread
Tom Axford Forum Pro • Posts: 10,067
Re: You need a lens with a larger image circle

Viernes wrote:

Tom Axford wrote:

You have to move the entire lens. All the lens elements must be correctly (and very accurately) aligned with each other for the lens to perform to its specification.

However, there is a problem with using a FF lens as a tilt-shift lens on a FF camera. Any lens designed for a FF camera has an image circle of 43mm diameter. The image rapidly deteriorates in both image quality and brightness if you exceed this diameter. The whole idea of tilt-shift is that you move outside the normal image circle, so you need a lens with a much larger diameter image circle.

If you allow a shift of 10mm in every direction, then the image circle of the lens needs to be 43+10+10 = 63mm. A medium-format lens should do this comfortably, but not a FF lens.

The idea was to use this broken FF lens on a m4/3 camera and play around with tilt-shift. If it suited me, then I'd build something better.

Micro4/3 requires an image circle of nearly 22mm, so if you can fix your FF lens, it should do nicely up to 10mm shift.

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