Morning City Streets

Thanks everybody for the feedback yesterday. Shooting with the tilt-shift lenses was definitely an experience . . . fairly challenging one at that. I'll attempt to answer all the questions I got yesterday here:

 

First, the lenses are all manual focus. Second, they're very challenging to use. There are a couple adjustment knobs - one to rotate the outer lens element ("tilting" - which creates the blurred sides) and one to translate (move up and down or side to side) the entire lens relative to the mount ("shifting" - which is for perspective correction only). Also, there was a lever that allowed you to rotate the lens so that instead of tilting in the vertical direction (to blur the top and bottom of the frame) you could tilt in the horizontal direction (blurring on the left and right sides of the frame).

 

Not only were some of the focus effects not completely predictable, but moving the lens changed the exposure a bit too. Whenever you tilt or shift the lens, you end up shooting out of the edge of the lens, so there is less light coming through and you tend to get the lower quality parts of the lens. This is why the tilt shift lenses are so expensive, I think - because since you're rarely shooting through the center of the lens, you have to have inordinately good optics.

 

You can largely get the same effect in photoshop, which would be easier and more controllable, but often harder to get to look as natural or 'correct' if that term even works here.

 

Some outtakes below. The object of this project was to get all the signs in focus and blur everything at street level and above the sign . . . just seemed like a fun way to look at things, to me. All of these shots were taken last Wednesday on a walk I took downtown between 5-6am. I wanted to get a few people and cars obstructing the photos as possible. The Hotel Monaco always has a car waiting for guests, 24hrs, so that was my one exception to the rule (and I didn't have time to wait it out).

Done