Canon TS-E 45mm f.2.8 Tilt and Shift Lens

by Geoff 10 Sep 0 Comments

Canon TS-E 45mm 2.8 Lens

The Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8 Manual Focus Lens is a normal lens featuring tilt and shift movements. The floating system and rear focusing give sharp and stable delineation from throughout the focus range of 1.3′ to infinity. Ideal for obtaining a natural-looking perspective in a distortion-free architectural image.

Tilt and Shift movements have been available on view cameras for many years and can be very useful in the smaller Digital SLR cameras.

A normal camera lens will provide sharp focus in only one plane parallel to the sensor and perpendicular to the lens axis, however when the plane of the lens can be tilted, then this plane of focus can be changed to be at various angles and photographers can adjust this plane of focus to obtain creative effects.

This functionality can be very useful in both landscape and architectural photography, to get both the foreground and the background in focus rather than just relying on the depth of field effect. Some photographers have also used these tilt effects in portrait photography.

The shift adjustment is a displacement of the lens parallel to the image plane, so that the position of the subject in the image area can be adjusted without moving the camera back.

Shifting of the lens can allow different portions of the image circle to be cast onto the image plane, this functionality can also be very useful to use when taking multiple exposure panoramas and stitching the images where the lens has been shifted rather than shifting the whole camera and lens assembly in normal panorama shooting.

It should be noted that a tilt/shift lens will have a larger image circle than a standard lens of the same focal length.

Canon have quite a variety of tilt and shift lenses in different focal lengths as follows:

TS-E17mm f/4L Ultra Wide Angle Tilt Shift Lens - An ultra wide angle tilt and shift lens.
TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II Wide Angle Tilt Shift Lens - Wide angle tilt and shift lens.
TS-E 45mm f.2.8 Tilt and Shift Lens – Tilt and shift lens suitable for landscape and architecture photography.
TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Telephoto Tilt and Shift Lens - A telephoto tilt and shift lens for product typoe photography.

Visit images captured by this lens on Flickr.