Experience with Samyang/Rokinon tilt shift on Fuji X

Rod McD wrote:

Hi,

As Andrew said, It's 24mm on any system. The FOV that this gives you is the same as a 36mm camera on FF - which means that it's not very wide at all on APSC. It would be tight for interiors. Fuji don't offer any TS lenses - a gap in the brand's lens range. Laowa offer a 15/4 macro with limited shift facility - as I understand it, the shift is limited to one direction.

The alternative for Fuji users is the 'adapter' route. You could adapt a FF shift lens, one with an aperture ring to allow exposure control. (I don't know if the smart adapters for Canon will allow you to control the aperture on their EF TS lenses.) You could also adapt a FF non-shift lens and still get some useful movement. The difficulty is not the adapter - they are very good. Once mounted, they're no fiddlier than using any shift lens.

The difficulty with adaptation is getting the right lens in the right FL for APSC. You need a lens with an aperture ring to control exposure and sharp in the outer image area, which you use more when shifted. I used a Nikon AIS 20mmf2.8 with some success, but that still only had the FOV of a 30mm lens on FF - so still not very wide. Legacy lenses wider than 20mm tend to get a bit soft by today's standards. And really ultra-wide lenses like 14-16mm FF lenses from the film era just weren't that sharp. CA's can also be an issue.

The age-old workaround is to crop from a modern WA non-shift lens. You compose with the camera back parallel to the subject and crop off the bottom. You would use a WA lens like the 14mm, 10-24, or any one of the many possible independent brand WA lenses (like perhaps the Viltrox 13/1.4). Yes there is a loss to cropping, but the impact of this will be determined by exactly how much you're cropping off, and your output, ie how big you're printing. High res sensors make this more feasible today than with earlier models.

Still another alternative is to consider SW correction of verticals. I have no expertise in this but I believe it's evolved to be quite sophisticated. There should be a lot of info online.

Hope that helps,

Rod

Hm you confirm my suspicion that there is still no proper TS offer out there. 
The tilting adapter route might work…i assume that would need to be paired with a FF wide angle lens to have the bigger projected image circle to allow for the shifting. F.e. the xf 8-16mm would have enormous vignetting, if I understand it correctly.

SW corrections of verticals is new to me? What is SW?