Canon TS-E 90 Tilt-Shift Lens

I haven't posted in a little while. A couple years back Cristin got herself a Digital Rebel XT camera body. She had some Canon lenses from an older film SLR. Last week, she picked up the Canon TS-E 90 Tilt-Shift-Rotate lens and we got to play around with this thing last weekend. Its kind of a rare lens, not commonly found, also pretty expensive.



All camera lenses generate a "field of focus" which is an area in space where the objects are in focus on the image. Most point-and-shoots use a wide angle lens to maximize the area within the field of focus so that everything more or less is in focus. But interesting photos can be taken by having some parts of the image out of focus and hence blurry. Almost all camera lenses have a field of focus forming a prism with two of the prism's planes (front and back) parallel to the film plate. Tilt-Shift-Rotate lenses allow you to hange that prism in interesting ways. You can tilt, shift, and rotate the field distorting it in interesting ways to change the image. This leads to some cool photo effects, such as making things look like miniatures, creating interesting focus on small objects, or taking photos of buildings so that parallel lines remain parallel in the photo.

Well, Cristin and I went down to the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum and took some flower photos, Some were head on, and due to lack of practice, many of those came out well with less effort. Others like the one on this post show some of the depth of field characteristics of the lens. Click on the flower to see more.