The Complete Portrait Manual by The Editors of Popular Photography

Author:The Editors of Popular Photography
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weldon Owen

114 BLUR PLANES WITH A TILT-SHIFT LENS

Meet the optical superheroes: Tilt-shift lenses can straighten tall buildings with a single shift, give you insanely deep focus without insanely small apertures, and limit focus to a single eyelash. They’re popular with architectural, product, and nature shooters who strive for perfect perspective, and treasured by others for the unusual effects they can produce.

And when it comes to portraits, those effects are dreamy. The lens barrel is stationed on a pivoting mount that permits you to rotate and tilt the glass—forward or backward, or to the right or left—so it’s not parallel to your camera’s sensor, creating a band of sharp focus with beautiful, otherworldly blur on either side.

The width of the band depends on the range of the tilt: Big tilts create narrow streaks of focus across the frame, while a small tilt will widen the area of focus. Conversely, if you tilt or swivel the lens the opposite way—to align the focus plane with subjects at different distances from the lens—you can achieve striking near-far focus without stopping the lens way down. You can also create magical bokeh (see #120) in a wide shot—shoot into a background with a lot of texture so you can see the effects of the focus plane being manipulated.

One caveat? There’s no autofocus with tilt-shift lenses. It may help to avoid shooting wide open, which will make your band of focus quite narrow. Eyeball focus by getting it close and halfway depressing your shutter, then recompose your shot and trigger it all the way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.