What is shifting?

Shifting is moving the front of the lens up/down or left/right, without moving the camera. Like this, you can completely change what the camera sees, without needing to move it all. Let’s look at an example here. These four shots have been done from the same spot, just shifting the lens.

As you can see, shifting a lens moves what you see by about 40% of the photo. There is a bit of distortion, but much less than if you moved the camera.

Correcting perspective distortion

The main use of shifting is to get rid of perspective distortion. You probably had a situation when you were trying to take a photo of something taller and you had to tilt your camera up to get it whole into the frame. The result of this is of course that all the vertical lines in the photo will start to fall toward the center, the more you tilt your camera.

Here you see an illustration of this. First tilting. As you can see, the field of view changes, to what you need, but a lot of perspective distortion is introduced with it.

Now let’s look at how it is with the tilt-shift lens. When you shift, the field of view changes, but the camera stays level. Like this, no perspective distortion is introduced into the photo, and all verticals stay at a right angle with the horizon.

Since you are shifting instead of tilting, you can take photos of taller structures without any distortions, and also take shots while being much closer to the object.

Here is a photo with a normal lens tilted up, and with the tilt-shift lens.

Panoramas/Vertoramas

Another situation where perspective distortion can cause problems is when you are taking panoramas or vertoramas. Each time you rotate or tilt the camera, you are introducing distortions, which makes the combining more difficult. with a tilt-shift, you can take all the shots without ever moving the camera. Let’s looks fist at a panoramic example:

Here I took two photos, one shifted left, and one shifted right. These then perfectly fit together when aligned. Or here is a vertorama example. Again taking the photos while shifting up to get the whole scene.

Moving the camera location

The last thing that it’s really useful for, is a way of moving the camera position, without moving the camera itself. What I mean by this is, that when you shift the lens, it looks like it moved the whole camera.

Let’s imagine a situation, where you stand on the edge of something and you just can’t move the camera further out. What to do now, when you want the view to be from there? You shit the lens, so getting the view from further out that you can move to. Same when you standing on top of something, and you would want the view to be even from higher up and similar.

This lens gives you views that normally would not be possible at all.

Why and when to take multiple exposures

High dynamic range
Of course the first and the biggest reason to do multiple exposures is to catch the whole dynamic range of a scene. Even the best camera can’t capture everything in one photo. You will need to blend images if you want to avoid overexposed or underexposed areas.
Better safe than sorry
Even if you think that the dynamic range is not too big and you will get everything from one photos, you can be mistaken. It’s better to have the extra exposures and don’t need them, that not having them and needing them.
Automatic backup
Anything can happen when you are taking photos. Even a tiny movement of the camera can destroy the image. When you ave multiple exposures, you easily can get around this just by using other exposures. If you took 3 and one is bad, you still have two that you can work with and so on.
Removing people from photos
Since you easily can under or over-expose a photo by one to two stops, you can use the extra exposures to remove moving objects or people from the final photos (more on this here). The same goes for other moving things. For instance, if there was wind and the leaves are blurred in the shot. You can take a faster exposure, like -2EV one, overexpose it to match the exposure you want, and then just blend it in. Since for that one the exposure time was shorter, the leaves will be more stable in it.

Why and when not to take multiple exposures

Files take more space
The most obvious reason, you will get more photos. The file don’t take that much space at first, but over time it stacks up. I know this best from personal experience :)
Takes more time
It takes more time to take multiple exposures. Especially in the evening, when you photos get into the 10-30s range, you will get to the point when taking just one photo takes up to few minutes. If you light is changing fast, and you have only few minutes to take you photos, this can be a problem.
You are taking photos handheld
Some do multiple exposures when taking photos handheld. I don’t bother anymore. Even in the brightest of sunlight you are just not able to hold the camera steady enough. You will not be able to blend the shots perfectly. Rather than this, underexpose the photo a bit. You will always be able to better correct underexposed areas than overexposed ares afterwards.
Taking photos of moving subjects
Again, if you are taking photos of moving subjects, just take one shots. You will not be able to blend the shots anyway. A good example here is fireworks. They change so quickly, you can get only one photo. But remember, if you did not move you camera, you can still take a multiple exposures of the scene afterwards, and just blend the moving subject into them later.

All Saint’s Day 2018

I have been posting a photo from the All Saint’s Day every 1st November for years now. And this time it will not be different. Again I stopped by the nearby Martin’s cemetery today, and took few shots of the remembrance candles all the visitors are placing on the graves there.

As usually, the play of all the lights looked spectacular and made for one very beautiful atmosphere. This photo was taken at one of the statues in the Martin’s Cemetery. Visitors placed all the candles so they created this heart shape, and I tried to catch it in this photo. Was not completely easy, as I was surrounded by people, but with the 12mm Laowa lens I could stand really close and still get the whole shape.

This is a 5 exposure HDR blended with the original exposures. HDR created in Oloneo Photoengine, blended in Photoshop.

Astana city center panorama

Let’s continue with another panorama today. This one was taken from the top of one of the skyscrapers in the city. It was right after a thunderstorm, so that’s why it’s quite cloudy there.

This is a three shot panorama, combined in Lightroom, finished in Photoshop. As you maybe noticed, sometime I use Lightroom and sometime PTGui for my panorama. The reason why I use both is simple. While Lightroom now supports HDR panoramas, it can’t create separate blending planes. It only creates one, already combined HDR photo. Since I like to blend in parts of the original shots, I need the blend planes. And this is what I can get from PTGui. So I use Lightroom only for panoramas, where I don’t use multiple exposures.

And here are few details:

In the snow

No, this photo is not actual :) I was looking through my Lightroom library, and randomly stopped on this one, so I thought I edit it and share it with you. I took this shot in early 2015, during a very rare winter day. It just snowed like crazy.

Unluckily, after about a hour in this snow, my camera broke (5D mark II at that time) and I could not take much more photos. But luckily, it started working again the next day, and worked since. Strange how things sometime repair themselves.

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