Mostly shift lenses are used to correct vertical keystoning. But another good property of a shift lens is the ability to shift diagonally, or sideways, to create an unusual perspective effect.
I wanted the two sides of the path leading up to the church door to form the one point perspective vanishing point, whilst showing the whole building complex.
The first shot has just a little vertical correction. The second shot has mostly lateral shift. I quite like this ploy.
Moving a little closer
I am impressed with what you are achieving with your shift lenses.
Just to clarify, the images are all taken from the same location? - I am assuming so, because that is the point of having the lens.
Next step for me is to get my head around how the lens achieves this.
The pictures were taken from the same distance, but i moved slightly to the right for the corrected shot, to stand on the axis of the path. The lens was shifted left to get all the building into the picture.
The principle is pretty simple. A shift lens is just a lens with a very big image circle. I am just cropping the image in camera. The FL remains 24mm. I coud make a similar picture if I used, let's say a 21mm lens and then cropped in post,
Correct me if I am wrong, but the cropping process occurs by the lens altering it's own axis, altering (shifting) the image falling on the sensor?
Correct me if I am wrong, but the cropping process occurs by the lens altering it's own axis, altering (shifting) the image falling on the sensor?
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Thats right, you are moving the lens axis.
Yes, ideally you want the plane of the image (sensor) to be parallel to the front face of the building, so that all the verticals are vertical and all the horizontals (on the front face of the building) are horizontal, with no keystone effects either horizontally or vertically.
I sometimes use diagonal shift to reduce the steepness of the converging lines, when shooting a building using two point perspective. I helps reduce the "pointy" effect sometimes.
Another use for diagonal shift, is when you cannot back off enough to get the framing you want. This is a bit of a compromise, but the two shots below show how I made a frontal shot using diagonal shift. Both these shots were taken from the same position.
The pictures were made with a 15mm shift lens
The alternative frontal shot was this.
I like that
Alan
Thanks. The shot above has a lot of things that i do not like visually. But I needed this front elevation for the series of pictures I make on each building I visit.
