CSC viewcamera!

[Kate-the-Great]

APS-C mirrorless cameras with large rear displays & adapters that add Shift and/or Tilt to 135-format lenses offer some neat possibilities for work with architecture/landscape subjects that previously would've required a view camera, or an expensive SLR + dedicated T/S lens setup. I took the route of putting an enormous tilt/shift-converted Nikkor AF-S 17-35mm 2.8 on my tiny EOS M and it has been an amazing kit for tripod work.

The Monstrosity

Samples

Some rise to get the tops of the skyscrapers in-shot

Maximum rise to fit the chimneys

Swing & Shift

Swing

3-Shot panorama assembled in Photoshop. Using multiple shots with the lens shifted, creating panoramas is as simple as aligning layers- no geometric distortion to correct for!

 

[Kate-the-Great]

Using the camera is very familiar to my time spent with 4x5 view cameras; leveling the tripod, framing carefully and using lens movements to frame instead of tripod movements, focusing on-screen with the digital magnification (the 21st Century version of a loupe!), remembering to manually close the aperture after focusing and setting the exposure manually of course.

It's a lot of fun to use; the flow of working with a view camera is something I enjoy greatly for my usual static, contemplative work. I find it therapeutic to take things very, very slow sometimes 🙂

 

[lynnb]

Great idea and results, Kate - thanks for showing us!

 

[lynnb]

A question: did you do the tilt-shift conversion, and F to EOS mount conversion yourself - and can you share how you did it? It's not something I'd tackle myself, but I'm sure there'd be a few members here who'd be interested..

Edit: I should have read more carefully - it's a tilt-shift adapter.. I didn't know about those.

Cheers,

 

[Kate-the-Great]

Yup, it's an off-the-shelf adapter. This one, to be exact.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kipon-Tilt-...993?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35c2f133a9

I'm pretty impressed with it, build quality is good and the movements are smooth enough. Kipon also makes this adapter in Fuji X-mount and Sony E, as well as adapters that do only Tilt or Shift that are a bit less expensive. I'm considering one of their Shift-only adapters for my X-E1 🙂

Edit to say- I see that Kipon now has a T/S adapter that claims to work with "G" type Nikkors- this could open up even wackier combinations, like the 14-24 on an M 😱

 

[back alley]

some nice shots...makes me feel guilty about being too lazy to drag my tripod around...

 

[dfatty]

wow, really neat, never heard of the tilt shift adapters for the eos m. love the straight lines.

 

[Sparrow]

yes ... lovely results, I'm impressed

I'm always interested in how these corrected images are perceived

 

[KevinS]

It's great to hear and see that these adapters do work. Being made in China had me wondering about the quality, but your shots look great. I like the one in the other thread the best. Thanks for posting!

 

[Kate-the-Great]

It's great to hear and see that these adapters do work. Being made in China had me wondering about the quality, but your shots look great. I like the one in the other thread the best. Thanks for posting!

No complaints about the quality here. I wish the knob for securing the tilt movement on mine was bigger (it's just a tiny metal thing) but I do see a newer version of the adapter on EBay fitted with a proper knob with bigger plastic grip. The craftsmanship is perfectly good though, high-precision CNC milled and the movements are still smooth after a year and a half of often using it in dirty environments.

The design is rather nice- I took mine apart to see how it's all put together and was impressed with what I saw. Very tight engineering to fit rise/fall, tilt & swivel (for changing the movement axis) into a ~25x60mm disc.

If you only need Rise/Fall/Shift OR Tilt/Swing, adapters that only do one or the other are half the price and look to be outfitted with geared movements for more precision. I'm contemplating picking up a Shift-only adapter for my X-E1 🙂

 

[ColSebastianMoran]

Very interesting, and great shots.

Amazon has the shift-only adapter, for example here for Sony NEX.

 

[Pablito]

Very interesting, thanks, did not know about these adaptors. But how much shift / tilt can you get away with given the image circle for most lenses is not usually much larger than the 35mm film frame or FF sensor when the lens is on-axis? Whereas lenses that are designed to be shift / tilt lenses have a larger image circle.

 

[Kate-the-Great]

Very interesting, thanks, did not know about these adaptors. But how much shift / tilt can you get away with given the image circle for most lenses is not usually much larger than the 35mm film frame or FF sensor when the lens is on-axis? Whereas lenses that are designed to be shift / tilt lenses have a larger image circle.

There's plenty of room for movements with most lenses. Keep in mind that Canon's APS-C is less than half the size of 135- there's as much extra image circle here as a dedicated T/S lens has on FF.

In practice, I can use the maximum +/- 15mm shift in any direction without any dark corners at 24-35mm with the 17-35 AF-S; there is some hard vingetting at 17mm and max shift but it goes away by 20mm. I've only run into an image circle limitation in the field once; I was doing a 3-shot stitched image in a cramped area and had to use 20mm instead of 17mm. That was the last photo in the post above- I think it turned out fine. Even 4x5 view cameras run out of image circle sometimes 😉


Edit to say- I did a quick test with my Nikkor primes; my 20mm f/4 AIs and 35mm 2.8S pre-AI ran out of image circle at 10mm shift; my 50mm 1.4 AI and 55mm 3.5 pre-AI only had a little bit of corner darkness at 15mm.

 

[Pablito]

Thanks - this is really useful information!