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

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.

It’s quite impressive how much one can get from a single RAW file. Just look at this one, in comparison to the original exposure. One would think there is no detail in the black parts, but there is so much of it :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Looks like the new Old bridge in Bratislava is really nearing completion, and now also the lights are on at night, even if one is still not able to access the bridge. But I hope that will be soon :)

So here is my first photo of the bridge with the lights on. This is mostly a single exposure, with a second one used to darken the bright lights on the pillar, and a third one used to brighten the bottom part of the bridge, as it was completely dark.

Don’t forget, only 24 hours left to join my photo editing contest. Now is your last chance :)

And today, here is a photo I took earlier last year at the Kuchajda lake. The sunset that day was a bit boring, but for a moment, a cloud right opposite of the sunset caught this wonderful color. So with a bit of running around the lake, I managed top get a photo of it :)

This is a blend of two exposures, done in Photoshop.