Now that we seem to have more than enough cameras to satisfy our filmmaking needs, it’s a good time to focus on lenses, and in particular specialty lenses. Let’s take a quick look at what you can do with a tilt-shift lens. In “The Secrets of Optics” course on MZed, educator Mitch Gross dedicates a module specifically to specialty optics and adapters. The lesson on tilt shift lenses, or “shift and tilt” lenses as they’re sometimes called, goes into some detail about when it makes sense to reach for a lens that lets you manipulate the focal plane. Getting started with tilt shift lenses Unlike spherical lenses which have the mount and the body of the lens locked together, a tilt-shift lens frees the body of the lens to move around. So now you can essentially “see around a corner” or look sideways at an object. The immediate effect of this is you can change the depth of field to do things that a regular lens can’t do. As you move the tilt-shift lens around, you can get a unique look where only a part of the image is in focus and the rest falls off into a blur. Image credit: Slavik Boyechko For close subjects, this makes for an interesting stylistic effect. Here’s a photo I took of my neighbor, using a Lensbaby Sol tilt-shift lens. There’s an almost radial look to the out-of-focus area around the subject. From a filmmaker’s point of view, you can use a tilt-shift...
Published By: CineD - Thursday, 24 February, 2022