24mm TS-E shifted penoramics

One aspect I'm interested in with the tilt shift is the ability to create stitched shots by just shifting the lens.

A tilt shift lens provides a much bigger image circle than a normal lens and shift moves the lens across that image circle, due to low distortion and no real camera movements (though more on that later) the stitching can be quite easy.

The downside is that you are moving towards the edge of the lens. This means lower IQ at the borders, vignetting and its more susceptible to show any filters used.

This morning I decided to have a play see what you can achieve. All shots taken on a 5d2.This is a standard unshifted frame (well 3, hdr'd in photomatix) at 24mm. Image size is about 5600x3700.

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Rob, I've used a 17 and 24 TS-E to do this too. It can certainly get wide... the 17 can reach a bizarre 10mm...

One thing you may try is rotating the swing axis to 30 degrees up or down from horizontal. This allows the image to nearly retain the 3:2 aspect (assuming that's appropriate for the subject.)

Like all things in life, it's a trade off. You loose a little in swing - instead of 12mm you get about 10mm - and compensation for parallax is nearly impossible. It does however push the lens extremes into the corners of your frame.

RobDickinson wrote in post #14622176
...technically I think I need to shift the camera in the opposite direction to the lens shift (keeping the lens in effectively the same place for each frame)...

This is correct.

What some people do is get a macro rail something like this:

http://www.adorama.com​/MCFRS.html

Then they do some testing and figure out how much to counter-shift the camera while shifting the lens to keep the lens in the exact same place. Then they mark the rail or just write down the resulting numbers, and then they can avoid parallax by using the rail to move the camera in opposition to the lenses movement.

However, I am a fan of the 30 degree 4-shot pano noisejammer mentioned. Makes for a nice ~3:2 shot that most closely replicates both having a much wider lens and having a medium-format camera (in terms of size and detail captured). I really don't concern myself with the parallax errors as usually the only people that notice those from a TS-E lens are photographers, and not always them.

Arentol, is there a good description/write up of your 30 degree 4 shot pano?

kevindar wrote in post #14623333
Arentol, is there a good description/write up of your 30 degree 4 shot pano?

PLease!

kevindar wrote in post #14623333
Arentol, is there a good description/write up of your 30 degree 4 shot pano?

I don't know of a particular writeup, but it is fairly simple...

Turn the lens on a 30 degree tilt to the left (should be a small "click" when you get there), shift all the way that direction (upper left corner), shoot. Shift all the way down (lower right corner), shoot. Turn back the other way until you get to 30 degrees right (lower left corner), shoot. Shift all the way up (upper right corner), shoot. Merge as a Pano when you get home.

That is the entire thing. The end result can be found on this page:

http://www.cambridgein​colour.com/tut...ft-lenses1.htm

Go down until you see the picture of a map of the world that has "stepped" corners. Hover your mouse over it to see the black frame that is a normal shot. The resulting shot you should get from the instructions above, is the 3rd (of 4 total) corner from the top on each side, down to the matching 3rd corners from the bottom. As you can see the end result is very close to the width of a full horizontal shift, yet also much taller with a much better ratio for printing, close to 3:2.

To put the results in numbers.... Final result of a horizontal pano I did when testing this out was 9499x3706. Final result of a 4-shift 30-degree corner pano was 9056x5619. So very little lost in width, a great deal gained in height. End result is actually ~8:5, but that is a lot closer to 3:2 than the ~5:2 result of a horizontal shift.

thank you.

Ah that makes sense thanks!