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(Page 1 of 2 pages for this article 1 2 >) Thursday, August 14, 2008The Swing of ThingsUsing tilt/shift lenses for good instead of evil
I recently shot a museum project where the style required almost exclusive use of tilt/shift lenses. (We occasionally used a Zeiss 14mm prime, but that was rare.) It was a lot of fun, but I remember how tilt/shifts were a considerable mystery before I used them for the first time. Here’s the nickel tour of how to use these lenses. This article is going to focus on using tilt/shift lenses with HD and video equipment. I’ll link to some additional reading at the end of the article that will provide important exposure compensation information for using them with film cameras. I used the Arri tilt/shift system, which incorporates a bellows and three lens controls: horizontal tilt, vertical tilt, and lens center shift. We used the system on a Varicam with a Pro35 adapter. This is how a normal lens works:
The field of focus is normally a plane (or, in some cases, a section of a sphere) perpendicular to the film or sensor plane. The distance of this plane from the lens is controlled by the focus knob. If you are trying to focus on two different objects at different distances from the film or sensor plane you’ll have to rely on depth-of-field or split diopters to pull this off. In the example above, the wall to camera left will be more in focus than the wall on the right, because the left side is closer to the lens. The tilt/shift lens system changes all of that:
By tilting the lens you also tilt the plane of focus. Now the entire back wall is equally out of focus, something not possible with a standard lens. You don’t have to tilt the lens very far to significantly change the plane of focus, thanks to something called the Scheimpflug principle. I don’t completely understand how that principle works, having gotten A’s in English instead of mathematics, but intuitively I grasp that the plane of focus pivots around a point where a line drawn from the front element of the lens intersects a line drawn from the film plane:
The practical implications of all this are laid out on page 2…
Cameras • Production • Training • (Page 1 of 2 pages for this article 1 2 >) 
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