Any photographers on here use tilt / shift lenses for portraiture ?

[hub2dee]

Longshot: Just wondered if any MNers or dps / dhs were keen / semi-pro / pro photographers and had experience of tilt / shift lenses for pictures of kids...

(Or lensbabies come to that)

Beety's a photographer I think?

Not used one for portraiture...Had a bash with one once doing buildings

Hi Beety - Example and review of Canon's 24mm one. They also do 45 and 90, I'm considering one for a 20D (1.6 X crop body)...

They allow control over the plane of focus to achieve some really unusual effects... instead of focal plane being parallel to film plane you can do all sorts of whacky things with it creating subtle, but powerful effects...

A couple of random pics I think which make use of them:

Girl

Girl on Bridge

Happy fella

It's different from a photoshop blur etc.... I think the control harks back to the medium and large format days with bellows etc. etc.

The other lense is a lensbaby which is reasonably whacky but less subtle.

Never tempted to do anything stupid with it then, LOL, spagblog ?

God don't get me lusting over another camera lens. I have the 10D. That does look very appealing...Santa...Santa?

Is the Pope Catholic ?

I don't think you can create excatly this effect in photoshop, and tbh I am lax (and crap) at post-processing, LOL.

My dh works in photography (he prints more than takes) but I haven't a clue what you're all talking about! (shows how much attention I pay...)

SpagBlog / Beety can I ask what you find are the most common focal lengths you have used for pictures of babies / kids over the years, and also whether you opted for prime or zooms ?

I have just moved from a Canon FD mount to EF, so I have no lenses to play with except a fast 50mm prime (80mm equivalent), but am looking to pick up a few more.

BTW - Spagblog, when you used it for the architecture shots did you find it a royal pain in the ass ? I understand they are fairly tricky to use well...

I presume at 300 your style is to keep a bit of distance from the subject and capture more naturalistic shots, right Beety ?

This is quite interesting as obviously typical portrait work is, say, 85 - 135mm range... I can well imagine being very close to the subject is distracting and just gets you lots of pulled faces with many children !