Large Format Photography Australia

I use a mixture of Direct and Indirect shifts (mainly rise and fall but sometimes lateral) depending on focal length, camera and surroundings.

With ultra-wides and indoors I generally just raise or lower the lens using direct shift. It is seldom a huge shift with a lens shorter than 90 and rigidity generally doesn't come into it.

With longer lenses I'll generally tilt the camera to frame the view I am after and then set the film plane to vertical with back tilt and then adjust the lens plane to where I want it to render the view I desire and the placement of the plane of sharpest focus.

I just wonder what others do.

My knowledge, use and understanding of movements is pretty much limited to direct shifts. Embarrassingly enough, I still haven't fully figured out tilts outside the "making a scene look like a model" kind of movement. It is my current goal to improve on this and start using tilts to my advantage and not have to keep shooting at f45+!

A mixture depending on the scene. Sometimes a slight fall or rise is all it needs but other times i have tilted the rail for composition then adjusted perspective and plane of best focus once thescene is framed.

Welly wrote:It is my current goal to improve on this and start using tilts to my advantage and not have to keep shooting at f45+!

Welly,

At f/45 I dare say a great deal of the benefit of large format starts to blur thanks to diffraction.

Swing and tilt are not all that hard to master - although you do need to develop a skill for thinking geometrically. Sinars make it a bit easier with their two-poingt focus system but their aids have never made me a slave to Sinar.

I tend to shoot F/22 almost always. F/32 is as deep as I will go as I don't want to kill the image with diffraction. I find I never NEED to go past f/22 but will shoot f/32 when I'm a little unsure.. (or with longer lenses)

Welly,

One of the great marketing scams with technical cameras is the pretzelisation on the camera for the ad. You know the one: the camera is contorted like the ABC Television logo.

In reality, for most landscapes/cityscapes etc, you need very little in the way of movements.

With my 72mm, I need bugger-all tilt to maximise DOF. It is so small that I actually have to fight the detent function; it wants to push the front back into the zeroed position…

With longer lenses and/or closer focus, there will be greater pitch to movements.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR4m70xr9mE is a good video to show how movements (Scheimpflug) can be done.

It's not too difficult to do in practice. You simply need to trial and (correct) error your focus. Put on some tilt or swing. Check focus near and far. If it's not the same, change the angle. Check focus again. Keep repeating until you have little or (preferably) no focus correction between the near and far objects. It really is that simple!

Agreed.

With my 75 I find I have to fight the zero detent to get the right amount of front tilt for landscapes.. its pretty tiny.. I find that depending on the shot I have been aggressive on swings, but with tilts on wider lenses you really only need a fraction of tilt to bring everything up super sharp.

What I'm finding when I use tilt movements on my camera, which has both axis and base tilts is I'm getting that "railway model" effect where I have a very narrow part of the scene in focus. I understand I may have to refocus but I find it doesn't appear to help.

I think I shall find a nice bright sunny day and keep at it! But like you say, generally I haven't had the need to use them but it would be a useful skill to have!

Perhaps that's what I'm doing wrong - putting too much tilt on it. I shall look tomorrow and have another go!

Love 'em, or hate 'em, the great contribution of the Sinars to LF operating is the two-point focussing system to calculate a relatively accurate amount of tilt or swing.

I recently posted an image of floral tributes stuck into the air-vents of the plinth of a huge memorial monument. I shot with the Super-Symmar HM 120mm lens and the Sinar suggested 20º of swing to the right. Working with movement like that applied it can prove difficult to see a worthwhile rendering on the ground-glass at times. More commonly the suggestions are in the order of just 2º or 3º.