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Monday, March 07, 2011

Filed under: Market Served •Fine Art •Nature •Stock •Travel •Products •Lenses •Technique •

Tilt-Shift Lenses

Tom Bol | 03/07

Try a tilt-shift lens for creative effects.

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Landscape photography is very popular, and rightly so.  Who doesn’t want to capture the dramatic scenes from our national parks and forests?  The challenge can be finding a unique perspective or location while visiting the parks.  I’ve been in a row of a hundred people photographing the same sunrise at popular overlooks.  I don’t see this as a bad thing, nature photography is very popular and it is great to see so many people getting out and enjoying the outdoors.  To avoid getting the same image as everyone else, I just challenge myself to create an original shot.  This motivates me to climb a nearby ridge or hike down to a river to seek out a fresh perspective.  If I don’t have the time to explore, then I will consider other methods of creating an original shot.  One technique is using a tilt-shift lens.

Tilt-shift lenses are lenses that enable the photographer to actually move the focus plane.  You can tilt the lens up and down, swing it right or left, or shift it up and down while staying parallel to the focus plane.  These movements offer a lot of creative options.  One popular use of a tilt-shift lens for the landscape photographer is tilting the lens down towards the foreground.  This will improve the depth of field of the shot; now those colorful flowers right off the lens front will be tack sharp leading into the rest of the landscape.  My favorite technique using a tilt-shift lenses is not creating more depth of field, but instead creating a radical selective focus shot.  To do this I swing the lens to the left or right which will move the focus plane out of the center, resulting in a mysterious feel to the shot.  This technique isn’t for everybody, but some scenes work really well with this effect.  Tilt-shift images also create miniature scale in images.  The shot here was taken in Milford Sound in New Zealand, and has a miniature scale appearance.  It was raining when I went out to explore the sound, so big scenes with sky weren’t looking very good.  I opted to try a tilt-shift lens and see what I could create.

There are two main choices for tilt-shift lenses, a dedicated lens or a Lensbaby.  I have a 45mm Nikon tilt-shift, and love this lens.  The optics are razor sharp, and the silky controls allow me to fine tune exactly where I want my focus plane.  I also use this lens for portraits and video.  Another option is using a Lensbaby.  I have a Composer, and this duplicates a similar look to my tilt-shift lens.  It takes more time to change apertures with the Composer, but they have interchangeable optics for different looks and the lens is relatively inexpensive   The next time you are faced with a cliche’ shot, try using a tilt-shift lens to make it more interesting.

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Use gels on your flash for special effects.

Tom Bol | 05/11- 05:35 AM

Adding gels to your flash and changing white balance creates unique images.

I like to follow this principle.  “The more skills you have, the better your chances for success.”  I used to use this principle as a climbing instructor when teaching students rope systems.  Inevitably on some climb something wouldn’t go right, maybe a simple thing like getting a rope stuck.  The more rescue and climbing systems you knew, the better your chances of having a solution to fix the problem.
The same is true for photographers.  Every photographer has a story about a ‘photo shoot gone bad.’  Strobes don’t fire, talent doesn’t show up, permits aren’t in order.  What separates one photographer from another is how they deal with these situations.  Clients like photographers who have solutions, not problems.  Knowing more technical skills behind the camera also helps.  And one of my favorite things to do is add gels to flash to spice things up.

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Creative Use of High Speed Sync

Tom Bol | 04/29- 10:11 AM

Use high speed sync to add mood to your shot.

When most people think of high speed sync, they think fast shutter speeds and freezing the action.  True, shooting at 1/8000 with flash is going to freeze the action no matter what the main light source is illuminating the subject.  But what about other uses of high speed sync and flash.  Until the release of the Pocket Wizard Flex system and Hypersync (see my last post), I was often frustrated shooting in bright sun.  I needed an aperture of F16 to get the right exposure at 1/200, my fastest sync speed using my Elinchrom Rangers.  What if I wanted to use a wide open aperture like F2.8 to get soft focus and blur out the background?  The answer is use high speed sync for selective focus shots in bright, sunny conditions.  Maybe high speed sync should be called ‘soft focus sync.’

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