Tilt shift lens versus straight lens + pp?

[TonyW]

I have a possible project coming up to photograph a significant office building which is about to be demolished. I would normally rely on Photoshop to adjust any perspective distortion. The question is, for the inside shots especially, would a tilt-shift lens give better results and avoid distortions that could not be corrected otherwise?

Also, I am not sure, without going to the place, what focal lengths I am likely to need. My shortest lens at present (on a Canon 5d3) is the 24-105. It is possible that I will need a shorter one.

[Manfred M]

If your budget allows it, look at the shift tilt lenses. Doing an accurate perspective correction is a lot of work, but the shift-tilt eliminates that issue. Canon has both a 17mm and 24mm version and suspect you could rent them.

I have a 24mm shift tilt and it is my workhorse for architectural work. I would love something wider for small spaces.

[TonyW]

Thanks, Manfred. I will try to investigate more to see what sort of spaces there are. I am normally quite confident about fixing perspective but there are traps if you are not careful. You need to shoot wide enough because bits around the edge tend to get lost.

[Manfred M]

You are quite right Tony, and as long as you know what you are doing and have a good baseline shot to scale the shot against to preserve the height / width correctly.

My main concern would be that your 24-105mm is not wide enough.

Also, please remember that the distortions you get with a wide angle lens will still be there.

Both of these shots were taken with the shift-tilt.







While the vertical and horizontal lines are "true", the wide angle distortion is still there.

[Mike Buckley]

Consider renting a lens. There's no need to buy such an expensive lens to photograph just one project.

[plugsnpixels]

Try a test series shooting multiple photos at a moderate focal length with generous overlap and using Photoshop's Edit>Auto Align Layers (or one of the other panorama software tools) to make a (usually) seamless collage.

I'm a Mac user and don't normally use Xara photo products but Designer Pro also did a nice job of this type of thing (scroll down in my review here for an example).

One advantage is these collages will be higher res than normal.

You can also make any needed perspective adjustments to the results using PS's Distort and Warp tools, etc.

[rpcrowe]

I agree with Manfred that a tilt-shift lens might be the best tool to accomplish your upcoming project. I also agree with both Manfred and Mike regarding the renting of a tilt-shift.

OTOH, using a tilt-shift lens has a bit of a steep learning curve. I had not a lot of problem the time that I used the tilt-shift. However, I cut my teeth on a 4x5 inch format view camera and some of what I learned using the view camera could be carried over to the tilt shift.

Correcting distortion in post processing is another viable way to work, especially if you keep the perspective distortion to a minimum when shooting. One of the ways to do that is to ensure that your camera is not tilted up or down when shooting the images.

[William W]

I have a possible project coming up to photograph a significant office building which is about to be demolished. I would normally rely on Photoshop to adjust any perspective distortion. The question is, for the inside shots especially, would a tilt-shift lens give better results and avoid distortions that could not be corrected otherwise?

Also, I am not sure, without going to the place, what focal lengths I am likely to need. My shortest lens at present (on a Canon 5d3) is the 24-105. It is possible that I will need a shorter one.

My experience is I am more likely to ‘need’ a T/S lens for OUTDOOR architecture or VAST (i.e. big) interior shots but not for smaller office spaces. (Noted as examples, Manfred’s T/S Architectural samples depict atrium and outdoor).

Indoors, in tight rooms, a 16 to 35 on 5D Series usually does the trick: I have also used a 15/2.8 Fisheye and de-fished it.

*

But is is the ‘large vast’ architectural structures when it is difficult to get the necessary SUBJECT DISTANCE and CAMERA ELEVATION to allow a relatively easy job for correction in Photoshop, then a T/S lens comes in very handy mainly because of:

1. the massive amount of images real-estate that you lose from the sides when you make the trapezium correction in PS.

2. it is often easy to see the degradation of quality at the top of the image as the horizontal resolution decreases.

3. it is outside scenes where it is more likely that there will be verticals close to the camera and also far away form the camera that you want in the shot: i.e. in an outside scene there is more likelihood that the Verticals will cover a greater RANGE OF DISTANCES from the Sensor Plane: this is a complication for really accurate PS manipulation, because each Vertical is at a different angle to the camera, by virtue of the fact that is at a different distance from it.

*

On the other hand, in a small room and usually for most interior shots - these three key points of value of a T/S lens are relatively easy to overcome or do not exist:

1. easy to get Camera Viewpoint and Elevation - hence not a acutely angled trapezium and not much loss at the sides when correcting in PP

2. (from 1) hence little horizontal resolution reduction

3. distance range of all the all the Verticals to Sensor Film/Plane is relatively small

*

If you do choose to buy or rent a T/S you might as well have ago at using it for interior work also. Some considerations are:

> probably will take some getting used to using it (I concur with Richard, having been taught in College to use a View/Field camera is a great advantage)

> irrespective of your skill at the use of a T/S it will still take longer to shoot the session

> one advantage of a T/S for typical interior architecture is that is the TILT will allow you to selectively adapt the Plane of Sharp Focus – which is nice if you need to pick out something – but doing that is not really typical for interior ‘architecture’ – usually more suited for ‘food’ and similar genres.

If you rent/buy/borrow a T/S then the 17mm would be my recommendation for the tasks that you outline.

And repeating if you want to use ‘one lens/one shot’ (non T/S lens) then you will definitely need something like a 16 to 35 or 17 to 40 for the interior stuff – and that lens would be handy for the outdoor shots, too.

WW

[William W]

Tony, attaining Robbie Ekins' opinion in this conversation would be useful to you, I am sure.

WW

[TonyW]

Thanks for all the comments.

Manfred, I think you are right about the likelihood that I will need a shorter lens than I have now.

Mike (Buckley), I agree that renting would be a good option for just one project. However, whether I decide to go for a TS lens or other, I am sure that would encourage me to look for other opportunities and it's been quite a while since I have bought any new lens.

Mike (plugspixels), the idea of stitching is interesting. I have only ever done it for panoramas so far. I should have a practice run with this idea.

Bill, I understand what you say about the perspective outside and it is possible I should just get a shorter straight lens for inside. I plan to do a reconnoitre outside the building to get an idea of what is needed. There is an interesting question with tall buildings especially. The perspective that the camera records is what the eye sees and that is sometimes what one wants in the picture. At other times, it looks better to reduce that perspective and perhaps even eliminate it completely to get an isometric picture like an engineer's drawing.

[loosecanon]

With modern software it is easy to correct in one dimension, but correcting the pointing up and across "to get it all in" shot is problematic. It is here that the shift lens comes as you can restrict the distortion to say the horizontal whilst the lens avoids the vertical distortion by the shift.