Most people are familiar with the way that a shift lens can ‘fix’ the perspective (verticals) in buildings or trees, even if they haven’t tried these lenses themselves. How these lenses work is often not completely clear and even those with experience typically don’t know how to make the most of them. Hopefully this article can make things a bit clearer.
The first thing that most people learn about creating pictures with ‘correct’ verticals is that the camera shouldn’t be pointed up or down but straight ahead. Let’s imagine we are working with a 24mm lens and that we’re taking a picture of a tower block. The only way we can get the tower block in is to point the camera upwards but that gives us a distorted view as shown below..
Iceberg