Readers of this blog may know that I love the look of images shot with Tilt-Shift Lenses.  I’ve even got a tilt-shift photo & video app on my iPhone.

I wrote a post about them back along (post here) about how a wedding photographer called Jonas Peterson uses them to creative merit in his work

At the Randall GTG social we were lucky enough to have Pete & Laura of Lawson Photography along (genuinely one of my fave wedding tog teams in the country).  Laura loves her Canon tilt-shift 45mm & uses is to amazing effect in their wedding work (check out her amazing T/S pics of Tobiah & Laura at the GTG here) and she let me have a play with it.

The first ever official BAWP T/S image, featuring on Phil Barber’s 1.2 strapped mkII, while he gassed with with Neil Matthews.

I love how it leaves a selective line of crisp in odd blur.

You can twist the tilty barrel round to get the crispy bit in portrait, landscape or diagonal formats.

I just love it.

It adds a wicked air of mystery.

Nice box

If signal had have been better I’d’ve logged into my Amazon iPhone app and made myself £900 lighter

To make this only-manual-focus lens work best, photographers often replace the focussing screen in their pentaprism with a special ‘precision matte focussing’ screen (so manual focussing is easier to do by eye).  However, Laura told me the trick to it is to use Live View on the mkII.  If I remember rightly, if you tilt the lens up, the image sweet spot will be at the bottom of the image and vice versa. The trick to using it is to switch on live view (where you can immediately see the tilt shift effect) compose the shot you’re after, tilt the lens, move the focus square to the area you’d like focus on & zoom it in, manually focus, zoom back out to compose & shoot.

I went up to the top of the hill for a play

I even had a play with a bit of self-timer mystery portraiture, by tilting the lens to blur out my face.

It generally looks best that way.

Another self-timer effort, perhaps foolishly catching some air over steep overhanging cliff!

Don’t be surprised if I get one of these Tilt-Shift puppies soon!

B

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