Nottingham & Canon 17mm TS Lens

Some nice shots, especially the last one.
What are the locations?
TS - Is that the tilt/shift lens?
 
Beautiful and I agree, bottom left - fantastic :)

Could you talk about the process? I know nothing about TS.
 
I haven't used it to take landscapes or architecture but I suspect he uses the shift feature rather than the tilt.

The shift part, imagine if you move your lens left or right in front of your sensor, flat and perpendicular. So if you start standing in the center of the room, looking directly ahead, and your lens can only get you the stage and not the seats on either side, instead of turn the camera on the spot, left and right to do your regular panoramic-esq, photo, you shift the lens left and right. Shifting that few mm actually adds quite a lot of content into the photo. It bends the light in a straight way...its hard to grasp over text, something you got to actually see through the camera and believe.

Loving the shots too, it's beautifully lit and colour balanced.
 
As Raymond has said Genoma, getting your head around Tilt Shift (or Perspective Control) lenses does take a bit of getting used to.

Take a look at the following Youtube video from Adorama, it explains it quite well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TTB6hKxKzE

In quite a few of the shots Marzipanogram has used the Shift ability of the lens to correct converging uprights. Shift the lens upwards, then move the camera down, this correct the verticals.

As Raymond has mentions, you can also keep the camera steady on a tripod, take one shot, then shift the lens to the far left, take another shot, then shift the lens to the far right and take a third shot. Each shot can then be stitched together to make a panoramic shot, using a program like Microsoft ICE.

The Tilt ability is what people normally associate with a Tilt Shift lens. It can give that miniature toy town look. However it can be much more useful than that. In Landscape Photography or Product Photography you can move the plane of focus to get everything from near to far in focus at the maximum aperture of the lens - no need to stop down the lens if you don't want to.

I suspect Raymond will use this more since you can move the area where you've focused around the image, e.g focus on a bride and groom in a shot and make everything around them out of focus, including things that are the same distance from the camera.

They really are beautifully made lenses, I took delivery of the Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II a week or so ago, the quality and sharpness of shots is astounding when you get it right.

One thing you have to be mindful of is that when you shift or tilt the lens, the metering will be off, so you have to meter without tilt or shift, then dial the settings in manually (or use a Light meter when your lens is set up and dial that in).
 
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Andy and Raymond, thank you for posting that. I did wonder what/how the T/S was used in these shots.
It is something I would like to try out but the lens cost is prohibitive.
Have any of you used Calumet for lens hire? They seem to have all the T?S variants at reasonable costs for a week.
 
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I got the 45mm TS-E, you can do things like this, shot in F/2.8 I think, yet look at the subjects in focus.

eUJragE.jpg

Andy brought up the exposure, that is tricky, tilting one direction against another, say up and down, yet looking at the same direction at the same scene, will dramatically alter your exposure level. For example you are getting a correct exposure with zero tilt and zero shift, and tilting up you need to under exposure by 1.5 stop, tilting down you need to over exposure by 1.5 stop. Yet what you are looking at is the same and you haven't actually look higher or lower, in fact, the content of the photo stays the same too.

like these two

8evq5O3.jpg

pyDMO2c.jpg

Shifting up, so you don't get that "narrow building at the top" problem.

GuJ6jR6.jpg

Typical stereotypical T/S shot that people use PS to fake.

VqNi3oq.jpg

Honestly, a t/s lens can do so much more than a regular lens, you have to think in so many ways, so much you can do creatively.

The rest can be found here.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18499661&highlight=tilt+shift
 
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Great shot Mark, I know 2 of those places very well from my Uni days.
Loving the colour processing, its absolutely bang on.

Some of the other shots on your website are simply are again superb.

Are you bracketing to get that amount of dynamic range or is it all done in post?
 
Genoma said:
Wow guys very interested, thanks for that. Very informative.
Click to expand...

Forgot to add, it is manual focus, and when you shift and tilt, it is semi manual exposure.

Without changing the Viewfinder screen, it is quite tricky to get things in focus at times, unless you use a tripod, LCD and zoom in 100%. So you end up using the distance meter on top of the lens a lot in street photography, get to learn the space around you and when an object comes into focus as you walk pass them or as they approach you. You become your surroundings 100 times more because the lens forces you to. You get to learn to track focus on a moving subject by turning the dial towards or away from you.

Skills that are lost in today's auto focus world.

TS-E lenses are not easy to use but they are very rewarding when you get it right.
 
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