I just returned from an amazing weekend teaching Tilt-Shift photography in New York City. The workshop was organised by Canon Live Learning, a division of Canon Inc. who made this a wonderful experience for everyone. This 3-day workshop was amazingly well organised and Canon provided a stunning amount of gear and technical instruction to everyone. Thanks everyone for pulling this off!
Why tilt-shift? Well, Canon has the world’s best line-up of these lenses, ranging from 17 to 135mm. These lenses are extremely versatile beasts. You get at least SEVEN lenses in ONE and I’ve been shooting several of these lenses for almost a decade now.
Here’s what they can do:
- A tilt-shift lens is a super sharp prime lens
- Shift lets you correct perspective. Or exaggerate it. Your choice.
- Shift lets you emphasise parts of the frame
- Shift can make your camera disappear in mirrors
- Shift can help make your panoramas better
- Tilt can give you seemingly infinite depth of field while using a wide-open aperture
- Tilt lets you emphasise portions of the picture while de-emphasising others
- Tilt lets you create a pseudo miniature effect
- Some of these lenses will double as excellent macro lenses, too
Tilt-shift lenses work great for architecture, portraits, street photography, landscapes, food photography… you name it. Or in short: there is almost no genre of photography that cannot benefit from a tilt-shift lens.
Of course you can best learn all the tricks these lenses can do on a workshop, away from your daily treadmill. And that’s what we did, together with 14 awesome students who had come to NYC from all over the US.
What a wonderful group of people, I’ll miss you all!
