Better landscape photos with a Tilt-Shift Lens

Photographers looking to improve their landscape photography know one thing - the wider the lens, the better. But using a wide-angle lens has its problems, the main one being that shots taken with a wide-angle lens can often be distorted at the edges of the frame.

A new lens from Canon helps to overcome this difficulty, and allows for a range of creative applications at the same time.

The TS-E 17mm f4 lens is the widest tilt-shift lens in Canon's line-up, and the boffins at Canon indicate that they have been influenced by feedback from professional shooters in putting together this latest model. The lens uses aspherical glass elements (making it look a lot like a fish-eye lens) and it is this feature that helps it to overcome problems of distortion.

That is only the start of what makes this lens different. Being a ‘tilt-shift' lens, it allows the user greater control over which parts of a shot to keep in focus and which to make blurry. This can be incredibly useful for drawing attention to certain elements of an image and produces an effect quite different from that obtained simply by using a large aperture. It does this by allowing the user to control the orientation of the plane of focus.

I have tried to draw attention to the helicopter in this shot by keeping it in focus and selectively blurring out the foreground featuring the tree on the left-hand side.

The same effect has been applied here to draw attention to the boat up ahead. Other distracting features of the shot have been selectively blurred.

Making one part of an image pin-sharp while blurring the rest can create some interesting artistic compositions. It is a feature of the lens that subject matter can also be made to look 'miniaturised' when the tilt and shift elements are used correctly. The effect has become something of an internet phenomenon recently, and is best exemplified by the excellent work of Keith Loutit, whose work can be seen on his website: http://keithloutit.com/

A shot like this one of a Kimberly waterfall shows not only the effect of blurring parts of an image but also the effect of 'miniaturising' it.

The waterfall in this shot has been similarly 'miniaturised'. Attention is drawn to the waterfall by blurring out the foreground more so than could have been achieved using a shallow depth of field on a normal lens.

So much for selective blurring. What about those times when you want an entire subject to be in focus? The ‘tilt' facility can be employed for this purpose too. When photographing an essentially flat subject (which a landscape typically is), the plane of focus can be altered so that the entire subject can be made sharp.

The shift' component of the TS-E lens comes in particularly useful when taking shots of buildings or other forms of architecture. Specifically, it helps to avoid converging lines. Take a photo, for example, of a tall building and notice how the vertical lines of the building seem to converge to a point high above the building. Employing the lens' ‘shift' feature allows the building to be angled in such away that the building's vertical lines stay vertical even in the photograph. The lens can also be shifted in the opposite direction and the camera tilted to accentuate the convergence for artistic effect if so desired.

It's useful to note that the tilt and shift function can be utilized independently or in combination, thus offering a large amount of control over the positioning of the focal plane.

The TS-E 17mm lens isn't cheap at approximately $2900 so it is best suited to high-end SLR users. However, snappers wanting to take their landscape and artistic photography to the next level could find it a worthwhile investment indeed.