**The Art of Tilt Shift Photography**

When shooting landscapes, photographers often find themselves dealing with the challenges of capturing depth of field and blur effect. One technique that can achieve these effects is tilt shift photography, which involves manipulating the camera's front standard to create a shallow depth of field in certain areas of the image.

For example, imagine taking a photograph of a landscape featuring buildings and cars. To create a blurred effect on the cars while keeping them in focus, the photographer would need to adjust the camera's settings or use post-processing techniques such as tilt shift effects in software like Photoshop. However, using the camera itself with a tilt shift feature allows for more control over the image.

In traditional photography, depth of field refers to the area within an image that appears to be in focus. The closer you are to your subject, the larger the depth of field, while the farther away, the smaller it is. However, at longer distances, achieving a shallow depth of field becomes increasingly difficult due to the limitations of lens design.

To overcome this challenge, photographers use tilt shift lenses or cameras that have built-in tilt and shift features. These allow for more precise control over the image, enabling the creation of specific effects such as blurring objects in the background or creating a sense of depth by manipulating the focal point.

**How Tilt Shift Works**

The fundamental principle behind tilt shift photography is based on the way lenses work. In a traditional camera, the film plane serves as a reference point for focusing images. When you focus your subject, they appear sharp against this plane. However, when you want to create depth of field effects, you need to manipulate the lens to achieve this.

In a tilt shift system, the front standard is adjusted in relation to the rear standard, creating an offset between the two elements. This allows for independent control over the image, enabling photographers to adjust the focal length or blur effect without compromising the overall composition.

There are several ways to use tilt shift: side-to-side (shift) movements can correct converging lines, parallelism, and camera distortion, while front-to-back (tilt) movements allow for controlling depth of field. By combining these effects, photographers can achieve complex compositional results that would be difficult or impossible with standard cameras.

**Large Format Cameras and Tilt Shift**

In traditional large format photography, the tilt shift feature is a critical component of the camera system. The lens design allows for precise adjustments to the front standard, enabling the creation of intricate images with deep depth of field effects.

For example, in 4x5 or 8x10 inch format cameras, photographers can use side-to-side movements (shift) to correct parallel lines, while tilting the front standard creates a shallow depth of field effect. This allows for capturing complex compositions where multiple elements need to be kept sharp, such as buildings and roads.

While traditional large format photography uses these features extensively, digital SLRs and mirrorless cameras have also incorporated tilt shift lenses. Brands like Nikon and Canon offer tilt shift lenses in various focal lengths, allowing photographers to achieve similar effects without the need for a specialized camera system.

**Applying Tilt Shift Techniques**

To effectively use tilt shift techniques in photography, one must understand the limitations of these features. While side-to-side movements can correct converging lines or parallelism, tilting the front standard creates depth of field effects. For this reason, photographers often combine both techniques to achieve more complex compositional results.

For instance, when capturing a landscape with buildings and cars in the distance, the photographer may use tilt shift to blur the background while keeping the foreground sharp. Alternatively, they could use side-to-side movements to correct parallel lines or straighten the horizon.

In terms of practical applications, large format photography is still an essential medium for achieving these effects. However, digital cameras with built-in tilt shift lenses offer greater flexibility and convenience in various shooting situations.

By mastering the art of tilt shift photography, photographers can expand their creative possibilities, experimenting with unique composition techniques that showcase the beauty of their subjects while manipulating depth of field and blur effects.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com slrps slart of Photography everybody welcome back once again to the Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and last time we talked about uh large format cameras and I told you I was going to talk about movements and what happens when you adjust all these wild knobs on here and what they do to the different standards on here um the first thing I want to talk about here is just to review real quick the large format camera I'm going to lift the lens shade for this the large format camera is comprised of a few things um it's comprised basically of two standards there's a rear standard which holds the film and a front standard which holds the lens they're Bellows between the two this keeps the area dark between the uh the lens and the film plane and then what you have across the camera are a series of knobs and things this is a lens shade to cut down and glare things like that and so what happens and what effects do you uh aim to achieve by dealing with different these are called movements when I adjust the position of each standard okay now right now everything is pretty much dead on and this is no different than a regular camera would be the film plane is even with the uh with the uh with the with the focal plane where the film sits is even with the lens plane and what I'm going to show you here is there's a series of things you can do um the first one is we're going to deal with uh what's known as rise and fall okay and Rise and Fall simply means and and there's also shift and there the same thing rise and fall adjusts any either one of the standards we'll deal with the front in all our examples here but it deals with moving the front standard either up or down now what this does is it changes its J position to the film plane back here so it's either going to go down and it's going to have a different view over there or go up and it'll have a different view also um consequently you can also do what's called shift where you move this front standard from side to side and I'll show you how this works okay now why would you want to do this and what is it used for well uh let's say that you want to deal with something like you're shooting a building okay and you want the building when think of it this way when you're standing at the foot of a building and you wouldn't be this close probably uh but if you're standing at the foot of a building looking up you're going to see the parallel lines that run along the side of the building you know they're straight but your eye sees them as converging okay uh think back to like when you took drawing classes in high school and you dealt with Vanishing points when you're dealing with 3D subjects and that's the the effect that you get or parallel lines appear uh to be at an angle and this can be a real problem when you're doing architectural photography maybe you don't want that view you want that to be corrected uh well the couple options you have are either getting a huge lift and raising the entire camera or you can simply use this rise and fall technique and if I loosen the Locking bolts here you can see that when I move these knobs this way it falls and when I move them this way you can get rise to the camera show you that so what you're going to be able to do is the effect that this gets is that you'll look like you're shooting from a much higher um uh distance or higher Point than you actually are and so that's a real Handy tool in correcting that consequently if you're shooting a fence or something like that and you're at an angle uh you can use the shift to go right and left um so that's a very handy thing to have uh and we talked about kind of barrel distortions the lens things like that that also contribute to that and this is a way of correcting those and so what you want to do probably is get your shot as close to perfect as you can and then you can uh then you can mess with the rise fall tilt and shift and and suit it to your needs which is is uh a much easier thing to do now I I have on this camera two ways of controlling that I can do it from the front standard I can also rise and fall from the rear standard on the film plane so you can get some pretty dramatic shifts in here if if required um the one problem you might run into when you have that much control is just making sure the lens has enough coverage of the film plane and most lenses if you have the right lens on there will uh this one specifically probably will not cuz it's designed for a uh a much smaller uh it was designed for a Polaroid camera but still a 4x5 but it just didn't have movements on it um actually it wouldn't quite 4x5 if I recall correctly it's been a while since I've actually used a Pathfinder because they don't make the film anymore it's long gone okay so those are the first two movements that you can do are rise fall and then shift okay and they do the same thing the second thing you can do is you can actually use what's called tilt and what I can do is I can actually let's see if I loosen these I can make it so I can tilt this front standard down or I could also tilt it up now why would you want to do that well the reason actually there's there's another method of tilt too down here if I unlock this bolt down here you can actually pull the whole standard towards you this way or you can push it back towards that way now this is a studio camera like we were talking about and a field camera probably doesn't have the across AIS Point um it just simply tilts from the base uh nothing wrong with that they can kind of achieve the same effect now here's what the effect is um if you're shooting and most of you are probably familiar with depth of field we've talked about that in a couple episodes and depth the field basically is How Deep The focal um the focal field is so for instance uh if I want to shoot a portrait of somebody and want to blur out the background I would use a shallow depth of field so my area of focus might be a couple inches it might be a foot something like that everything that's not in that focal range is out of focus okay and one of the difficulties with this is if you look on the side of any lens where it start showing you the um uh the the measurements and feet of how close how far away you are you'll notice that just the way the lens works is there's much greater tolerance at closer distances than there is at longer distances so if I'm shooting a landscape for instance and maybe it's a bunch of buildings and there's some little cars down below uh you see this a lot websites like Flickr people are doing this uh where you can do a tilt shift effect and really it's mainly they're dealing with the more the Tilt than shift shift is for correcting something and the Tilt is going to deal with depth of field it's hard to get depth of field at big sizes and long distances just because the way lenses work you're not going to be able to get a shallow depth of field when you're a mile away from something uh you know shallow depth of like a foot or something like that it's just not going to happen so if you want the cars to appear in Focus but maybe the buildings right behind them to not that's going to be really hard if not impossible to do on a standard camera now however you can obviously do effects in Photoshop but if you want to do it from the camera uh and I think you get the most interesting effect doing it from a camera you're going to use that tilt now here's how it works the the film plane back here okay is basically just a straight line and the film sits you know just right along that line and if I move okay so what I'm doing is the lens is out here and I'm projecting the image onto there okay so in its Essence when I focus my subject is in Focus against that film plane okay cuz that's where the picture is being taken from for and this is either digital or film cameras it doesn't make any difference it' be a sensor back here instead of a piece of film okay so what happens is if I if I tilt that front lens it's going to throw the focal length side to side like this or you could also do it this way and but what's going to happen is is that things in the middle here will stay in focus and things on either side of that will drift out of focus so basically what you're doing is you're getting some depth feel back just from the camera and you're actually forcing it into play there you probably don't need it on macro shots or closer distances because the the lens will have an up depth the field for what you're looking to do on that uh however larger landscape types of things uh groups of people things like that if you want kind of an artistic blurred effect uh you can achieve it by by using U tilt on either the front or the rear standard both these movements happen on uh either side here so that's a very important thing also um uh but anyway just to reiterate so you do get rise fall on both standards you get side to side that's the shift on both cameras and you get tilt on both standards sorry not cameras uh the Tilt occurs in two ways you can do it from the lens axis here if you use these top knobs or I could tilt that entire standard by using the bottom one so those are the two effects that you can get with large format cameras and you can also combine the two so for instance if you needed to correct parallel lines and throw them out of focus you could do that uh you can also I should mention too if we've if we've moved that focal point it would be technically in the middle of the picture I could also use rise and fall or shift side to side to throw that focal point around onto the negative or the or the digital sensor whichever you're using so you get a lot of control that way now uh for the most part this is limited with this many movements to large format photography to 4x5 8x1 and up um you can do it however on digital slrs and 35 mimm cameras even at that um the big companies Nikon and Canon have built uh lenses that do tilt shift and so you'll see that I think Canon has like a 35 mm tilt shift I think there may be something in the 40 mm range 45 mm range and then usually the 90 mm range and they don't have near as much motion obviously you can't adjust the rear standard on a camera um but they do have you can actually shift the lens and you can spin it to use rise and fall or you could uh also uh move the lens to tilt to get the blur effect too and so you see I mean that's kind of a popular technique that a lot of people use now um in photography particularly with long distances where you make like car and cities look like little miniature objects because you're throwing them out of focus so they look like they were taken in a much smaller scale with like a portrait focal length something like that so any those are some effects that you can get out of using a large format camera anyway that's all for today we'll talk about some more next time so once again this has been the Art of Photography and thank you for watchingjoin us now on Flickr at flickr.com slrps slart of Photography everybody welcome back once again to the Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and last time we talked about uh large format cameras and I told you I was going to talk about movements and what happens when you adjust all these wild knobs on here and what they do to the different standards on here um the first thing I want to talk about here is just to review real quick the large format camera I'm going to lift the lens shade for this the large format camera is comprised of a few things um it's comprised basically of two standards there's a rear standard which holds the film and a front standard which holds the lens they're Bellows between the two this keeps the area dark between the uh the lens and the film plane and then what you have across the camera are a series of knobs and things this is a lens shade to cut down and glare things like that and so what happens and what effects do you uh aim to achieve by dealing with different these are called movements when I adjust the position of each standard okay now right now everything is pretty much dead on and this is no different than a regular camera would be the film plane is even with the uh with the uh with the with the focal plane where the film sits is even with the lens plane and what I'm going to show you here is there's a series of things you can do um the first one is we're going to deal with uh what's known as rise and fall okay and Rise and Fall simply means and and there's also shift and there the same thing rise and fall adjusts any either one of the standards we'll deal with the front in all our examples here but it deals with moving the front standard either up or down now what this does is it changes its J position to the film plane back here so it's either going to go down and it's going to have a different view over there or go up and it'll have a different view also um consequently you can also do what's called shift where you move this front standard from side to side and I'll show you how this works okay now why would you want to do this and what is it used for well uh let's say that you want to deal with something like you're shooting a building okay and you want the building when think of it this way when you're standing at the foot of a building and you wouldn't be this close probably uh but if you're standing at the foot of a building looking up you're going to see the parallel lines that run along the side of the building you know they're straight but your eye sees them as converging okay uh think back to like when you took drawing classes in high school and you dealt with Vanishing points when you're dealing with 3D subjects and that's the the effect that you get or parallel lines appear uh to be at an angle and this can be a real problem when you're doing architectural photography maybe you don't want that view you want that to be corrected uh well the couple options you have are either getting a huge lift and raising the entire camera or you can simply use this rise and fall technique and if I loosen the Locking bolts here you can see that when I move these knobs this way it falls and when I move them this way you can get rise to the camera show you that so what you're going to be able to do is the effect that this gets is that you'll look like you're shooting from a much higher um uh distance or higher Point than you actually are and so that's a real Handy tool in correcting that consequently if you're shooting a fence or something like that and you're at an angle uh you can use the shift to go right and left um so that's a very handy thing to have uh and we talked about kind of barrel distortions the lens things like that that also contribute to that and this is a way of correcting those and so what you want to do probably is get your shot as close to perfect as you can and then you can uh then you can mess with the rise fall tilt and shift and and suit it to your needs which is is uh a much easier thing to do now I I have on this camera two ways of controlling that I can do it from the front standard I can also rise and fall from the rear standard on the film plane so you can get some pretty dramatic shifts in here if if required um the one problem you might run into when you have that much control is just making sure the lens has enough coverage of the film plane and most lenses if you have the right lens on there will uh this one specifically probably will not cuz it's designed for a uh a much smaller uh it was designed for a Polaroid camera but still a 4x5 but it just didn't have movements on it um actually it wouldn't quite 4x5 if I recall correctly it's been a while since I've actually used a Pathfinder because they don't make the film anymore it's long gone okay so those are the first two movements that you can do are rise fall and then shift okay and they do the same thing the second thing you can do is you can actually use what's called tilt and what I can do is I can actually let's see if I loosen these I can make it so I can tilt this front standard down or I could also tilt it up now why would you want to do that well the reason actually there's there's another method of tilt too down here if I unlock this bolt down here you can actually pull the whole standard towards you this way or you can push it back towards that way now this is a studio camera like we were talking about and a field camera probably doesn't have the across AIS Point um it just simply tilts from the base uh nothing wrong with that they can kind of achieve the same effect now here's what the effect is um if you're shooting and most of you are probably familiar with depth of field we've talked about that in a couple episodes and depth the field basically is How Deep The focal um the focal field is so for instance uh if I want to shoot a portrait of somebody and want to blur out the background I would use a shallow depth of field so my area of focus might be a couple inches it might be a foot something like that everything that's not in that focal range is out of focus okay and one of the difficulties with this is if you look on the side of any lens where it start showing you the um uh the the measurements and feet of how close how far away you are you'll notice that just the way the lens works is there's much greater tolerance at closer distances than there is at longer distances so if I'm shooting a landscape for instance and maybe it's a bunch of buildings and there's some little cars down below uh you see this a lot websites like Flickr people are doing this uh where you can do a tilt shift effect and really it's mainly they're dealing with the more the Tilt than shift shift is for correcting something and the Tilt is going to deal with depth of field it's hard to get depth of field at big sizes and long distances just because the way lenses work you're not going to be able to get a shallow depth of field when you're a mile away from something uh you know shallow depth of like a foot or something like that it's just not going to happen so if you want the cars to appear in Focus but maybe the buildings right behind them to not that's going to be really hard if not impossible to do on a standard camera now however you can obviously do effects in Photoshop but if you want to do it from the camera uh and I think you get the most interesting effect doing it from a camera you're going to use that tilt now here's how it works the the film plane back here okay is basically just a straight line and the film sits you know just right along that line and if I move okay so what I'm doing is the lens is out here and I'm projecting the image onto there okay so in its Essence when I focus my subject is in Focus against that film plane okay cuz that's where the picture is being taken from for and this is either digital or film cameras it doesn't make any difference it' be a sensor back here instead of a piece of film okay so what happens is if I if I tilt that front lens it's going to throw the focal length side to side like this or you could also do it this way and but what's going to happen is is that things in the middle here will stay in focus and things on either side of that will drift out of focus so basically what you're doing is you're getting some depth feel back just from the camera and you're actually forcing it into play there you probably don't need it on macro shots or closer distances because the the lens will have an up depth the field for what you're looking to do on that uh however larger landscape types of things uh groups of people things like that if you want kind of an artistic blurred effect uh you can achieve it by by using U tilt on either the front or the rear standard both these movements happen on uh either side here so that's a very important thing also um uh but anyway just to reiterate so you do get rise fall on both standards you get side to side that's the shift on both cameras and you get tilt on both standards sorry not cameras uh the Tilt occurs in two ways you can do it from the lens axis here if you use these top knobs or I could tilt that entire standard by using the bottom one so those are the two effects that you can get with large format cameras and you can also combine the two so for instance if you needed to correct parallel lines and throw them out of focus you could do that uh you can also I should mention too if we've if we've moved that focal point it would be technically in the middle of the picture I could also use rise and fall or shift side to side to throw that focal point around onto the negative or the or the digital sensor whichever you're using so you get a lot of control that way now uh for the most part this is limited with this many movements to large format photography to 4x5 8x1 and up um you can do it however on digital slrs and 35 mimm cameras even at that um the big companies Nikon and Canon have built uh lenses that do tilt shift and so you'll see that I think Canon has like a 35 mm tilt shift I think there may be something in the 40 mm range 45 mm range and then usually the 90 mm range and they don't have near as much motion obviously you can't adjust the rear standard on a camera um but they do have you can actually shift the lens and you can spin it to use rise and fall or you could uh also uh move the lens to tilt to get the blur effect too and so you see I mean that's kind of a popular technique that a lot of people use now um in photography particularly with long distances where you make like car and cities look like little miniature objects because you're throwing them out of focus so they look like they were taken in a much smaller scale with like a portrait focal length something like that so any those are some effects that you can get out of using a large format camera anyway that's all for today we'll talk about some more next time so once again this has been the Art of Photography and thank you for watching\n"