GF 30 TS Practice Session 3 - Better Shift and Failed Tilt

[TimoKoo]

Rob, with Tilt.... If I mount the camera L plate to the tripod and tilt up down, the camera is fixed and the lens swivels, and the result is converging lines. When you relevel, you take the camera off plane to level back up to get rid of the converging lines, which is the same geometry as if you were mounted on the lens foot and the lens was locked and the camera moved when you tilted.

Maybe - not sure.

There are pluses and minuses to the two ways to attach to the tripod. I suggest you pick one and stick with it to take some variables off the table.

I agree. It looks that the rig is more stabile if you use the foot.

1. If that picture I posted is how it works (all movements are behind the collar), then the front of the lens stays put and all the moving happens on the back of the lens. If you do a lot of shifting for panoramas and you're concerned about parallax error, this avoids it. There's no drawback to this, but you do have to realize that it's the back end that is now tilting because the front stays put.

I agree.

2. If you mount the camera body to the tripod with the L-bracket, then the camera stays put and the movements are happening on the lens. You might find this a bit more "obvious", e.g., when you tilt, you can see the front of the lens going somewhere, and the camera isn't moving.

Regarding the camera being level or not, you're overthinking this. Fundamentally, it's not different than if you weren't using a tilt lens.

I agree, it might be overthinking. But I thought that everything in level was a good starting point which makes it easy to see what happens when you move one thing like tilt or shift keeping everything else untouched.

Remember, having the camera dead level is something you need to worry about only if you're concerned about converging verticals (e.g., architectural and interior photography), or if you want things to look like someone would see if they were looking at the world level and square.

Isn't it level and square? ;-)

So for your living room scenario, I'd level up the camera properly, use shift to get the balance between ceiling and floor that I was after, and then use tilt if that's what the image called for. That lake picture I posted a couple days ago -- same. I set it up as if someone was standing there looking at the lake (so levelled the camera, used shift to get the amount of sky I wanted, and used tilt to get the depth of field).

However, if you're not worried about things being level, tilt works exactly the same way. You just have to think where you want the plane of focus to go.

And it is quite easy to correct converging verticals in post but how do you correct the missing sharpness in part of the picture if your plane of focus were set to wrong place?

Edit. @Greg I tried to answer to your post but failed. I got the "Subject is too long" error.