I agree with you about everything you wrote, but for correcting in the camera, or correcting in PhotoLab, but considering that lens sells for around $3,500 or so, for me it’s “vaporware” just like the new Leica cameras. For my purposes, PhotoLab is certainly “good enough”. If that lens was 1/10th the price, I’d likely buy it, but it isn’t, so end of that dream. But even then, while PhotoLab can correct the perspective issues, it can’t do anything about the depth of field changes. A few days ago, I didn’t know (or remember) any of those discussions about changing the depth of field by tilting the lens. Thanks to you, it’s now buzzing around in my brain, but as I’m sure Wolfgang feels, there are far more important things to concern myself with. (But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about a lot of things I’ll likely never own). I’ve even been reading about mirrorless cameras, but not with any intent to buy one.
For a professional photographer, while that tilt shift lens might be useful, a camera like your Ebony would be a far better choice. For a hobbyist - maybe not. It depends.
Heck, I’m aware of all the changes, good and bad, on the newest Leica M11, but there are almost 9,000 reasons why I’ll never get one, not in this lifetime.
A side note. I just read that there is a new firmware update to the D850 to version 1.30. You probably are on top of such things, but I wanted to mention it to you while I had it in mind. I don’t know what it includes.
I do (was curious): One new picture control setting for portraits which only affects RAWs if developed in NX Studio, and an exotic issue about bluetooth connection interrupted when cleaning the camera sensor. Some settings blocked the mirror, sensor cleaning was then not possible. Imo not worth the effort of updating. But there are some tales about hidden functions in FW updates, so who knows what would be the “secret functionalities”…
No I didn’t.
But from what I understood from the Merklinger’s link, which I’ve seen before, it is not meant for solving problems which count be resolved with a regular dof approach. It’s not a typical tilt lens item.
I’m sorry but you’ve not got the whole story about movements.
Without movements, you would have to use hyperfocal distance focusing to get everything from near to infinity in focus. This has disadvantages in that, if you close down the aperture too far, you end up with diffraction, which will soften the overall image.
For example, with a full frame DSLR, a 28mm lens at f/10, focused at 5.2m, will give you diffraction free acceptable sharpness from 2.6m to infinity. So, as long as nothing is closer than 2.6m, you need do nothing else.
But if you need a longer focal length, that starts to increase the hyperfocal distance and limit the nearest thing that will be acceptably sharp.
This is where tilt and swing comes in by allowing you to place a line of sharpest focus that starts at the film plane and extends towards the horizon. Any DoF starts as a minuscule distance from the film plane and gets wider, the further away from the film plane. It is often referred to as a “wedge” of acceptable focus instead of the traditional idea of a “sandwich filling”
In the Bourges shot, at f/32, this gave us a left plane that passed just behind and along the wall of the building on the left, whilst the right plane cut across, from the film plane to the nearest visible part of the wall of the houses on the right, thus ensuring that everything from the film plane to infinity, within the field of view, is sharp.
When the plane of focus is parallel to the sensor they meet in infinity, mathematical.
When tilting the lens one side of the focus plane is coming near but it will not meet the sensor/film itself. On one side of the sensor the distance between focus plane and sensor will become smaller and on the other side it will become larger.
If you look at the animation in that link you’ll see that the line of focus plane is moving towards the camera on one side and moving from the camera on the other side.
Draw 2 lines on each side of the focus plane and you have the dof.
I’m sure you get wonderful results with your camera but I just don’t see the profits of a tilt in your example.
And again, I never used such a camera.
Although it is theoretically possible to calculate all this stuff, I don’t know of any working LF photographer who does. With all the members we had in the UKLFPG that I used to run, it is a practical skill that really needed transmitting from one to another. It is only usually when you see the effects of the various movements, for yourself, on the ground glass screen, that the penny really drops.
We used to help each other, teach each other, in the field and in evenings spent discussing and asking questions.
No you don’t. The DoF starts as zero at the hinge point and then gets wider as it progresses forwards from there. It’s known as the Scheimpflug principle and describes the optical science behind non-parallel film and lens planes.
I am not surprised you don’t “get it” - but if you were to attend a workshop, it would quickly become clear.
The Manual of Photography talks about the “zone of sharpness”, which is as good a description as you’re likely to get, because the expression “depth of field” is difficult to measure as the distance between the rear and front of the zone of sharpness varies, depending on the distance from the hinge point.
This site has a series of articles that Merklinger wrote for the Shutterbug magazine back in 1993. Look at this article in particular for a clear diagram of what is and isn’t (acceptably) sharp.
I rather like this quote…
One can find an infinite number of ways to adjust a view camera that obey the Scheimpflug Principle but still do not put the image in focus. When you somehow do find the right camera set-up, sure enough, it obeys Scheimpflug. Most view camera photographers focus the camera through hard work and experience
…which neatly sums up why it is easier to demonstrate than write about the Scheimpflug principle
One can calculate the focal distance from the image distance. Draw a line from the sensor/film plane through the optical center of the lens and calculate the subject distance on that specific line. Since the lens is not parallel to the film/sensor plane the image distance is changing, so both subject distance and dof are changing too.
The result is a line like in the Merklinger link and a dof from 0 to some maximum.
Like I have already said, no real-life photographer bothers with theoretical lines, measuring or calculating. It’s all done by looking on the ground glass screen and using the good old adjust/check/repeat technique.
Shouldn’t this also apply to focusing, or do LF photographers look at DOF charts?
Just curious.
Not that I have any plans to buy a LF camera, for so many reasons.
If I lived in France, I would take your class.
This sounds like another good thing to understand, along with DOF.
If sharpening an image was more useful and practical, this could potentially be included in PhotoLab as another tool. Maybe in the far off future…
Seriously, when you’ve got a 5" x 4" GG screen and a decent loupe, you can examine every part of the image and see if it’s sharp enough.
You could always “pop over” for a holiday
Unless you have any intention of taking up LF photography, it’s interesting to know but useless for DSLR work.
The truth is that sharpening after the fact is never truly satisfactory, although I have used Topaz Photo AI, which can work miracles, in an emergency.
