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Selective Focus Can Be Your Friend — Tilt Photography on the Cheap

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Hey photo friends – Erik here. While I’m typically the video guy around these parts,  I wanted to hop on the blog to quickly tell you about a piece of camera gear that I’ve been enjoying lately.  I picked up a Tilt Transformer from Lensbaby about a month ago and it’s now a permanent piece of my walk-around photography kit.  The Tilt Transformer allows you to mount your Nikon lenses to a Micro Four Thirds or Sony NEX camera and then swivel the Tilt Transformer around for some dramatic selective focus shots. Tilting the lens creates a “slice” of focus that can be adjusted vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, and the size of the focus slice can be adjusted by changing the aperture on the lens.  It’s a great way to create tilt-shift style photography for a fraction of the price of a single tilt-shift lens.

Q: What is the benefit of a tilt or tilt/shift lens?
A: The benefit of a tilt (or tilt/shift) lens can be myriad, but mostly it’s incredibly effective at removing visual noise and focusing or drawing the viewer’s eye to the intended subject.

Use the image tabs atop this post to take a spin through a gallery of photos I shot with it and my Olympus E-P3 and see what I mean. Also take a peek at the Lensbaby site for more details.

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182 replies on:
Selective Focus Can Be Your Friend — Tilt Photography on the Cheap

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  1. faisal says:
    April 13, 2012 at 5:39 am

    Pics are really very good, nice work.

  2. Hernan Zenteno says:
    April 12, 2012 at 6:39 pm

    9 and I can’t decide if 2 or 10 are the frames. Many thanks for share, hope Lens Baby people have plans to make some adapter for the new Fuji x 1 Pro. All the best

  3. Luke says:
    April 12, 2012 at 3:41 pm

    Love the b&w space needle shot.

  4. Sam Pardue says:
    April 12, 2012 at 1:43 pm

    Love Shot #9! Totally cool near to far focus!

  5. Michael from Lensbaby says:
    April 12, 2012 at 11:51 am

    Great photos Erik! I especially like #9 – it really shows how the “slice” of focus works in three dimensional space.

    To answer Steve & Earl’s question, we currently offer an 80mm tilt optic for the our line of SLR lenses. Check it out!
    Thanks,
    Michael

    1. Brenda Tharp says:
      April 12, 2012 at 12:41 pm

      Heh, Michael – thanks for the link – I’m a bit behind on the cool new LB stuff and your optical simulator for the Edge 80 really showed how cool it can be. Gonna have to get me one…

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