Can someone explain tilt shift to me?

[Viggen]

Im at a loss here. Any examples also?

[The Adam Blaster]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt-shift_photography

I had to look it up.

[Wander]

I've always thought of it as the way to make tree's not lean away from you when you're using a wide angle lense. Tilt/Shift lenses have two plane adjusters to change the tilt and/or shift of the image in the finder and eventually on film. I haven't seen one of these in a long time and they are expensive lenses. I think this is mostly corrected post production (photo editing) now.

[DesertBoater]

Feel free to adjust what I'm saying, however this is how I learned it. Tilt/Shift originated with large format cameras. With a normal 35mm or digital camera and a traditional lens, the plane of focus (your lens) and the film plane (sensor/film) are parallel. This allows you to get the entire frame in focus (disregarding depth of field). With a large format camera (Ansel Adams-esque camera) both the lens and the film plane are adjustable side to side, up and down, and front and back...ie they can tilt forward and back, and swing side to side, as well as shift/slide up and down. What this traditionally would allow you to do, is make lines of perspective disappear. In simpler terms, you know how if you look up at a building, all of the truly vertical lines appear to converge toward the top. With the tilt/shift capabilities of a large format camera, you can actually eliminate that perspective by making both the lens/focal plane and film plane parallel to the face of the building. So that is a basic overview of adjusting both the plane of focus and the film plane.
With a normal SLR camera, there is no way to adjust the film plane. However with a tilt/shift lens you can change the orientation of your plane of focus. This allows you to select only what you want to have in focus in your image. It can create very interesting effects, however can also be very difficult to use well. Often you find images of miniature/scale cities, houses, etc shot with a tilt/shift to help give depth and a hint of reality to the image.
The really nice tilt/shift lenses are generally very expensive, however if you're interested and don't want to pay an arm and a leg, take a look into Lensbaby. It's a completely manual lens system with absolutely no electronics or moving parts. You adjust the aperture by removing and replacing small magnetic rings that each correspond do a different aperture size. They're a lot of fun to play with and can really exaggerate motion and direct where the viewer looks.

I hope that helps.
Cheers,
West

[Michael Slade]

Let me set up the view camera and make a video. With the 8x10 it's pretty apparent what happens.

Give me a day or so...

[DesertBoater]

Let me set up the view camera and make a video. With the 8x10 it's pretty apparent what happens.

Give me a day or so...

Yeah...that will make it a whole lot easier to understand! Thanks!

Cheers,
West