Question about DIY tilt-shift lens

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.

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.

I guess I'll have to throw this 50mm into the trash and use another one instead.

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.

Viernes wrote:

I have a broken 50mm f/1.8II lens from Canon that I want to use to make a DIY tilt-shift for my m4/3 camera.

The front element is completely loose from the rest of the lens.

50mm lens with front part removed.

The question is this: can I secure the lens original mount to the camera and make the tilt-shift by moving ONLY THE LENS FRONT ELEMENT?

Cand I do the tilt-shift moving only the front part of do I have to fix it first?

Or first I have to attach and aligne both front and rear elements and do the tilt-shift by moving THE ENTIRE LENS?

I have a tilt adapter for m4/3. The lens itself has to move to get the effect. I don't get much of an effect with 50mm. 28mm is better.

You can buy simple tilt/shift adapters for m4/3. They aren't expensive.

If you want the toy or Lensbaby effects, those are homemade, but they might cut up the lens anyway for some reason.