
This will help keep your gear down to a minimum. You can also use it without the tilt-shift feature. The lens is then shifted upwards to include the top-most part of the building. For this to work, the camera needs to be level and pointed directly toward the building. This feature, for example, lets you photograph architecture without the converging verticals. This is way bigger than the EF lenses 43.2 mm standard image circle. The Canon TS-E 24 f/3.5 Tilt-Shift, for instance, projects a 67.2mm image circle. The projection of these lenses creates much larger image circles than a typical lens. The shift feature allows the lens’ optics to shift compared to the image sensor. This is also true when using a wide aperture, where areas to the left and right will fall out of focus. This way, everything from the front to the back of the frame can be in focus. The plane of focus runs vertically through the frame. By tilting a lens left or right, you change the way the two planes interact. In a normal lens, the focal plane and sensor planes are parallel.

This is where the lens plane and image plane/sensor are not parallel. The tilt feature uses the Scheimpflug principle. The photographer tilts and shifts in different directions to overcome the difficulties of perspective control. The main aim of the tilt-shift lens is to reach even parallelism and a greater depth-of-field. That is why tilt-shift lenses have a complicated construction and are quite pricey. Newer lenses also rotate, allowing the lens to cover a wider area.Įven though they do not offer in-lens stabilisation and autofocus, these lenses are specialised photography equipment.

A tilt-shift lens has optics inside it that can be tilted and shifted.
