If you’re new to photography or unfamiliar with how tilt shift photography works, this video by Matt Granger will explain everything.
Tilt shift photography can be used for many different kinds of effects, including correcting the keystone effect. The keystone effect is when you’re too close to a subject like a skyscraper and you shoot upwards and it looks like the building is larger on the bottom while thinning to a trapezoid shape on the top, almost like the building is collapsing on itself.
Many architectural or real estate photographers use this to nix this effect, but as Granger in this video shows you can do much more. Photographers can use it to correct perspective, but it can also create an intense area of focus that blurs, or blows out, part of the frame that is not in the line of focus.
It seems to have an endless amount of variations that can give you different effects. Older photographers had this same control with their rise and fall bellow cameras that can also create the same selective focus as a tilt shift lens.
Check out this article I wrote for Outdoor Photographer magazine in 2008 about how to shoot like Ansel Adams with tilt-shift lenses for DSLRs.
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