Another shot taken with the 17mm tilt-shift lens. This one is a vertorama from 3 exposures (center, shifted down, shifted up). It’s crazy how much you can get with this lens, and how easy is to make a panorama. Since one does not need to move the camera at all, the pictures just fit together almost perfectly. I did a lot of panoramas recently, and now it looks like there will be even more of them :)

And to show you the difference, I’m including the original middle exposures, which is the same as if you used a normal 17mm lens. You can see how much more you get just by shifting the lens.

Technique: Photoshop Edit, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 17mm F4 TSE, Focal length: 17mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 25s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.139465, 17.104995

Yesterday I got myself a new lens, the Canon 17mm F4 TSE and of course I had to try it out right away. For those not familiar with this lens, it’s a specialized tilt shift lens, great for architecture, interior and panorama shots. I will do more articles about this lens, as I also want to do a guide on shifting and tilting, but for today, few of my first observations after few hours of use:

– great sharpness
– the area you can cover is crazy big, this is one really wide lens (if you shift)
– quite easy to use, but the knobs could have been a bit bigger
– looks like its easier to catch lens flares, but that is not a big surprise
– the light leaks are quite visible in longer exposures, will have to experiment if this is only when shifted, and look for some nice cover for the lens

So my first impressions of it, are that I’m really happy with the purchase, will see how it works out on my next trip :)

This is a 4 shot pano (I did the horizontal shift to get three shots, and then rotated the lens and did one more vertical shift to get the top of the castle, see first comment for a merged panorama without photoshop edits). This ended up as a 75Mpix image after cropping. That is really a lot. Btw. the towers are not the same size, the left one is bigger, thats why it looks different.

I’m including a shot of just the panorama before photoshop edits. As you can see, the corners are missing, as you cant shift into them. I filled them in with Photoshop. Was not that hard as it was just the sky :)

Technique: Photoshop Edit, Number of exposures: 4, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 17mm F4 TSE, Focal length: 17mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 3.2s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.141558, 17.100143

Please excuse the temporary downtime of the blog. I will be moving the blog to a new host in a few weeks, which should make problems like this a thing of the past. I would have done it right now, but I have 3 weeks of travel in front of me, so I have to deal with that first. But I hope there will be no more downtime until then, and all works as it should.

I wonder why I did not take another shot for this panorama, to make it a bit wider. I regret that I did not include the mountain on the right. But hard to say what I was thinking when I took this panorama. Still, I like how the shadow is perfectly placed around the golden ratio, for a nice composition :)

This is a two shot panorama, taken at the Grossglockner High Alpine Road in Alps in Austria. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Technique: Photoshop Edit, Number of exposures: 2, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 16-35mm F2.8, Focal length: 35mm, Aperture: 14, Middle exposure time: 1/125s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 47.121260, 12.820338

I’m a little low on new photos right now, so here is one more of the lights on the new Old bridge. But I’m currently planing a trip, so there should be new photos from many interesting places very soon :)

For this shot I took three exposures, but due to soft earth under the tripod, they were not properly aligned. So I ended with just using a single exposure, which I overexposed to get the detail in the bridge shadows, and underexposed to get the detail in the pillars. It worked out quite nicely. All edits done in Lightroom and Photoshop.