bikes and things

Last week I was able to go and shoot another completed building for work. I wanted to do a proper job so I arranged to hire a tilt shift lens for the day. I spent a fair bit of reading about precisely how they work online with various videos as well as the previous evening practicing. I wasn’t interested in the tilt or swing operation, just the shift for keeping verticals straight on the elevations. I hired one of these, a Nikon 24mm PC-E ƒ3.5.

Previously I had been using my standard zoom and keeping it fairly wide, as well as fully level on the tripod and then correcting the barrel distortion in PT Lens, then correcting the vertical lines in Photoshop. Pretty time consuming to edit all the shots like that really but the best I could do with my equipment.

It took me a while to get used to actually using the lens but once I did I was incredibly pleased with it. I would go so far as saying it was a complete revelation. It’s very sharp although I often had trouble focusing it properly in low light for the dusk shots towards the end of the day – it’s manual focus only – and there’s no split screen to help with focusing. However it was great to be able to compose the shot properly in camera rather than shooting wide and cropping down later after correcting perspective. I also got a fair few shots that I was completely unable to get before using my previous approach. It also felt a lot more creative to get these shots on site and know that they worked before leaving site.

Editing the shots was also much much quicker. Set white balance, minor exposure adjustments, sharpen, then export. I got all my shots edited down in around 3 hours rather than the full day I would have needed before. If I was doing this professionally I’d want to use this lens on a full frame body such as a D700 or D3 to take advantage of the properly wide angle rather than the 36mm of the cropped sensor on the D300. If I hire it again I’ll also get a much stiffer tripod with a geared head as getting the camera completely level is so important with this lens.

Anyway at £1400 it’ll be a while before I can afford this one! However if I can get a few commissions I could imagine that it’d pay for itself pretty quickly.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with the final results.