Canon TS-E 24/3.5L (1st generation)

For many years, 35mm camera users have often been able to safely ignore the subject of camera movements. Not so for the large format folks, the relatively large film plane of a 4×5 view camera requires photographers to go to lengths even in the simplest images to get a deep depth-of-field, lengths that often include both camera movements and enormously tiny apertures (e.g., f/64). Our smaller film (or digital sensor) areas come along with a comparatively deeper depth of field. For better or worse, we may not wish to maintain our ignorance much longer.

If, like many photographers, you keep a close eye on gear announcements, you’ll have noticed the trend. While Canon had been selling three tilt-shift lenses for years, more recently they updated the 24mm tilt-shift with the Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II (greatly improving it’s optical quality) and added a 17mm to the lineup. In the same time frame, Nikon announced and began to ship 24mm, 45mm and 85mm. What’s behind this new excitement?

I believe one of the primary drivers of this new life is the increasing resolution of digital cameras. With three DSLR manufacturers now producing cameras with over 20 megapixels, the hurdle for “enough” depth-of-field has gotten higher and higher. The traditional solution of simply using a smaller and smaller aperture (that is, a bigger and bigger f-number) has become less and less appealing, too, as that effect (which blurs images more and more for very small aperture openings) becomes more objectionable at higher resolutions. So, what’s a photographer to do?

The large-format guys folks among you already know the answer. While we small-format folks often think of depth of field and focus distance in terms of distance from the camera, it isn’t required (as a matter of optical physics) that the “focal plane” of a lens be perpendicular to the direction the camera is looking in. It is possible, quite possible, to tilt the focus plane in useful ways using the “tilt” camera movement on a tilt-shift lens. If your scene (and this is a big “if”) falls primarily along a plane, such as a flat landscape of low flowers, it’s possible to adjust the focus plane to put the whole field of flowers, from near to infinity, “near” the focus plane. This allows you to keep everything in focus with the lens at a larger aperture (lower f-number, smaller depth-of-field) and keep everything sharp. As a bonus, you’ll also end up with a faster shutter speed, which may help keep those flowers from blurring in the wind.

The advent of LiveView has been a real boon to photographers wishing to use tilt-shift technologies as well. It is often incredibly difficult to adjust the non-intuitive controls of a tilt-shift lens with an optical viewfinder. Modern electronic viewfinders that allow one (on a tripod) to spend time zooming into different areas of an image enable far more precise placement of the plane of focus.

While I believe that using tilt to improve (apparent) depth-of-field is the primary reason we’re seeing more of these lenses, it’s not the only reason. It’s possible to use the same effect to reduce the apparent depth of field, rather than to increase it, an effect which many folks are now leveraging to create faux “miniatures”. Also, shift movements can be incredibly valuable for perspective correction, as well as having additional uses in shooting for panoramic stitching and architectural work.

While pricey (most of these lenses are in the $1500-$3000 range) and challenging to use, we’ll be seeing more and more of these lenses in the coming years as a part of the never-ending quest for photographic perfection. In an upcoming post (probably late this week), I’ll give you a quick demonstration of what these wonders can accomplish.

Why a Tilt-Shift Lens may be in Your Future. is a post from: Your complete Guide to digital cameras, reviews and news

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You may have heard several terms with regards to cameras. A camera can be film based, where light exposes film captures the image in this way, and digital where the light triggers a digital sensor and saves the image to a memory chip or card in the camera. There are also point and shoot cameras which come with a built in lens and single lens reflex (SLR) cameras which have interchangeable lenses. Professionals choose SLR cameras because they can be customized to the subject and light conditions with the change of a lens.

Your first choice of lens should be one with a focal length which can range between thirty five and seventy millimeters. Keep in mind that this measurement is for the standard film based camera and digital cameras may have focal lengths which differ from this measurement.

Why this lens? Because it allows you to get pictures which include a substantial amount of background and surrounding scenery. The image is reproduced faithfully with very little distortion. This is important if you are taking pictures of friends and family or are just shooting general scenery. The range of light that you can shoot in is also much more extensive than it may be with other focal lengths.

Many people find that they love shooting birds or wildlife. If you are shooting these kinds of subjects you need to look into purchasing equipment which can handle fast movement and shooting over longer distances than other subjects. The same choice that you purchase for animals will also work very well for sporting events. Look for a focal length that starts at about one hundred and fifty millimeters and goes to more than three hundred millimeters.

Remember that as your focal length increases, the amount of image captured by the lens will decrease. Have you ever looked through a paper tube? A short tube can still let you see a lot of a particular image. A longer tube, or a longer focal length, will produce more isolated images that tend not to include a lot of surrounding scenery.

If you want to shoot very wide images you will need what is known as a wide angled lens. If it has a very short focal length, you will get a wider picture but it may be distorted. This means that the image you shoot may look odd or twisted in some way when you look at it.

Finding the right camera lenses is as much a matter of personal preference as it is the type of shooting you are doing. As time goes on, you will find that your collection will expand and you will love trying new and different focal lengths and shutter speeds in your pictures. Good shooting!

For the beginning photographer with a point and shoot camera, the choice of camera lenses is usually not an problem. This is because the average digital or film camera does not allow the photographer to change the camera lense.

What To Look For When Shopping For Camera Lenses is a post from: Your complete Guide to digital cameras, reviews and news

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In general, the viewfinder system of dSLR cameras operates very much like their film SLR counterparts. That would be great, except for one thing: Such systems rob you of the use of the digital sensor up until the instant the exposure is made. One of the primo advantages of digital cameras, the ability to see the sensor image prior to exposure, doesn’t apply to digital SLRs because they operate too much like their film ancestors. Here’s a quick checklist of how this quirk affects you:

? No live preview. You can’t preview the image you’re going to take, exactly as the sensor sees it because the sensor can’t create an image until the mirror flips up and out of the way. The LCD of a dSLR is used only for viewing images after the fact, plus for displaying menus and other information.

? No live histograms. As you’ll learned in later posts, histogram displays are a great way to optimize exposures. If the histogram “chart” is skewed too much in one direction or another, you can add or reduce shutter speed, aperture, or EV value to get the best possible exposure. Non-SLR digital cameras have what are called “live” histograms that show up on the LCD and/or EVF while a shot is being composed, so you can make corrections in real time. That’s not possible with a dSLR for the same reason you can’t get a live preview:The sensor is blind until the moment of exposure.

? No sneaky surveillance-type shooting. You can connect many digital SLRs to a USB cable and use a special program to control the camera from a distance. However, once again, you’ll be shooting blind. Your control program probably can download your remote photos to your computer after they are shot, but you can’t monitor what the camera sees before taking the picture. If you want to catch a shoplifter in the act, you’re better off with a regular video surveillance camera or even a high-end non-dSLR setup to provide a live feed to your monitor or computer.

? Shooting blind in dim light or with infrared filters. Here we go again. Because you’re limited to viewing through the dSLR’s optical viewfinder, if light conditions are very dim or you’re using an infrared filter, you have to shoot blind. LCD and EVF viewfinders often have circuitry that boosts the gain under dim conditions, providing you with a fuzzy, sometimes black-and-white image, but one that can still be viewed, even if you’re shooting with an infrared filter that blocks visible light.

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Frankly speaking, for the serious photographer, a single-lens reflex camera is the Holy Grail. Anyone who’s used a point-and-shoot camera of any sort and then graduated to an advanced non-SLR camera with extra features and more control is probably still dissatisfied and is yearning for a digital SLR.. Whether you’re shooting film or digital, if you’re serious about taking pictures, an SLR is what you really want.

That’s not to say that other kinds of cameras don’t have their place among enthusiasts and professionals.
Leicas and other rangefinder-style film cameras have long been prized for their small size, precision, quiet shutters, and superb optics. Some of the best images ever made have been taken, and will continue to be taken, with Leicas and the like. Twin-lens reflexes like the Rollei have served ably as professional cameras using film sizes larger than 35mm. And view cameras, which accept sheet film holders in sizes up to 8 × 10 (and larger), continue to be important for high-quality illustration and portraiture, although these days view cameras are as likely to be fitted with a digital sensor back as a film back.

SLRs are not the only cameras a dedicated photographer would find acceptable, but, if you compile percentages, the single-lens reflex is way ahead of whatever is in second place. Indeed, in the digital photography realm, the success of so-called “SLR-like” cameras such as the shooters with internal electronic viewfinders (EVF) from Konica Minolta, Olympus, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, and others stems from just how closely they can mimic features that are common to virtually every SLR. In most respects, they are deliberately designed as a “next best thing.” Despite their status as a “junior SLR,” these imitators are not necessarily cheap. You can pay almost $2,000 for a Leica Digilux and more than $1,000 for many of the leading EVFstyle cameras.

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