Chapter 10. The World Through a Tilt-Shift Lens
Southridge Farms, a suburb of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
ISO 400 f/2.8 1/1500 90mm
Every time I look at the image on the next page, I remember thinking at the time I wouldn’t come back with a single image from the assignment.
This was Super Bowl XLI, the Chicago Bears versus the Indianapolis Colts, and the rain never let up during game time. It was a record-breaking game in terms of rainfall; the only time it finally stopped was during halftime, when the musician Prince performed.
ISO 800 f/2.8 1/640 45mm
It was the worst time to be using a 45mm tilt-shift lens: a wide-angle lens that you purposely tilt up had no protection from the rain. I had a horrible time. My glasses were fogging up repeatedly, which also made using a manual focus tilt-shift lens a pretty hard thing to pull off.
I left that game thinking I had absolutely nothing, and I was distraught because I was drenched, and thought I had probably destroyed a few cameras (though they actually survived the dousing).
When I went through the photographs, I had only two usable images. One was of Peyton Manning winding up for a pass—nothing special. The second one, thank God, was that of the game-winning touchdown.
If it was at all possible to pick a lucky moment to be at the right place at the right time, this was definitely it.
The Surreal in the Real
A tilt-shift lens allows you to rotate the front lens element either left or right, or up or down; and when the front lens element is no longer parallel to either the sensor or the film plane, the only area in focus is where the focal plane intersects with a sensor or the film plane. Everything else appears gradually out of focus.
A tilt-shift lens lets me create photographs that make people stop and examine the world more carefully, because the resulting image doesn’t look real. It arrests you. It reminds me of how as a kid I would photograph my toy train station using a 50mm macro lens.
Images created with a tilt-shift lens force people to explore the photograph. They are looking at a real scene, but one that has a touch of the surreal in it. Many people can’t tell what you’ve done, while others wonder whether you created the surreal effect with a computer. But in either case, they are completely drawn into the image.
Every lens you use distorts reality in a certain way, depending on its degree of compression and depth of field. A camera lens doesn’t see the world the way your naked eye does, and tilt-shift lenses push that to the extreme. Using one is no different than using an old 8-by-10-inch–format camera, which has a bellows and a movable front and rear standard.
The Washington State Ferry makes its way toward Seattle. The ferry’s capacity is equivalent to that of five Boeing 747 airplanes, about 2,500 people.
ISO 40 f/2.8 1/500 24mm
I appreciate the fact that the effect was done in-camera with optics, rather than with software. Beyond the look of the photograph, it allowed me to elevate what I was able to do with subjects that lacked inherent drama.
For example, in the commuter series that I did for a magazine assignment, I was faced with one of the most boring subjects you could imagine shooting: commuting. It’s an everyday event that happens all around the country, a hundred thousand times a day, and the challenge was to capture it in a way that was unique.
That’s why I chose the tilt-shift: it allowed me to create a very wide image of a scene, and still have a way to emphasize the people—the commuters. The wide-angle, tilt-shift lens provided me with a good sense of scale and perspective, yet I could sometimes narrow the focus down to that one individual who would otherwise get completely lost in the frame. That’s what I loved about it.
It’s important to point out that I don’t think I could have shot this way for the New York Times. I think it’s more acceptable for feature photography in magazines—photography that’s meant to illustrate ideas and concepts.
I don’t really see tilt-shift photography as being appropriate for hard news events. I wouldn’t shoot with a tilt-shift lens in Pakistan. That being said, as my career matured and grew, I was naturally leaning toward taking more chances and pushing that envelope, stepping away from pure editorial photography. I found it was tremendously limiting to creativity not to be able to use different tools, and to light things in certain ways.
Images created with a tilt-shift lens force people to explore the photograph. They are looking at a real scene, but one that has a touch of the surreal in it.
Serving the Story
With a tilt-shift lens, the focal point has to be perfectly placed. It’s a much more fine-art approach, like that of using an 8-by-10 field camera. You continually refine the composition until you’re blue in the face, and you have one frame to fire.
You can never trust your light meter when making a tilt-shift photograph, because of the way the path of the light changes as it travels through the lens. The light no longer passes through a straight path as it does with other lenses, so you can’t trust the automatic-exposure controls of the camera or what you might see on the back of the LCD.
To ensure that I achieve focus accurately, I magnify the image on the back of the camera to double-check my focus, because it is extremely hard to see where I had focused with the tilt-shift lens by using just the optical viewfinder. And because I tend to shoot tilt-shift photos wide open, I have to make sure the focus is right.
This is another image from the tilt-shift series on commuting. I shot it in Amish country in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and I’ve always loved the small details in this image. If you look really closely between the two houses, you’ll see an elderly Amish man with a white beard and straw hat, a touch that gives a beautiful sense of balance to the photograph. It’s one of my favorite images.
When shooting from the air with a tilt-shift lens, you should first consider position and elevation relative to your subject. You have to realize that while you’re waiting for a moment, you’re trying to make the photograph live off the aesthetic.
Shooting from the air with a tilt-shift lens compounds the challenges, especially as you try to stay in focus. But it’s also exciting: after more than 15 years of practicing photography, I could get to the point where everything was sharp because I knew how to use my camera system. Since the autofocus system isn’t a viable option with a tilt-shift, I had to go back to focusing manually and trusting my skill and experience.
The Amish and Mennonite horse-drawn buggies share the road with modern vehicles near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
ISO 400 f/4 1/1000 90mm
Tilt-Shift As a Gimmick
This distinctive look eventually led to a tilt-shift photography craze, including tilt-shift iPhone apps, which has resulted in a lot of images created using tilt-shift lenses for no apparent reason; they’re just done in a gimmicky way. I think any technique should be used to help tell a story.
In my tilt-shift images, no matter what, there was always a very clear point where the focal plane crossed the sensor, so I was forcing the audience to look at something. It was never a random point picked without a subject. I was highlighting a subject, and purposely deemphasizing everything that extended away from it.
You should use a tilt-shift lens for a reason, and with a purpose—to augment or tell the story in a better way—and make sure you always choose a specific focal point to help accomplish that. If you just use it as a gimmick, then you’re just destroying it for everybody. It’s an utter waste of time, in my opinion. Most of the tilt-shift photography I find doesn’t really express anything, except calling attention to the technique itself.
This first image shown here was made during the World Series when the Detroit Tigers were playing the St. Louis Cardinals. As always, I tried to tell a story with the tilt-shift technique. In this case, I tilted the lens and rotated it a little bit so that only the pitcher and the batter were in focus. In baseball I think there’s a big duel between that duo, and that’s what I was trying to portray.
The Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals compete during Game 1 of the 2006 World Series at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, Michigan.
ISO 200 f/3.2 1/100 45mm
You should use a tilt-shift lens for a reason, and with a purpose—to augment or tell the story in a better way—and make sure you always choose a specific focal point to help accomplish that.
This next image, which I shot in Grand Central Station in Manhattan, is one of the rare vertical images I’ve made with tilt-shift photography.
It’s very hard for me to make a nice vertical tilt-shift image. You’ll notice that I really prefer to make tilt-shift images that have the tilt or the shift happening on the horizontal plane. In other words, everything gets more in or out of focus toward the top or bottom of the frame. I don’t like it as much when it’s switched so that it’s from left to right.
At the time of this shot, we were still feeling raw from the events of 9/11. I felt that the American flag was a pretty important element to have as part of Grand Central, and to have it hovering above these masses of people going in and out of the station.
This lens choice allows the photographer and the viewer to appreciate the environment and the world in a very different way, I believe, than if it had been shot with a standard lens.
ISO 500 f/2.8 1/20 45mm
Commuters wait for a train for a New York City-bound Metro North train in Scarsdale, New York.
ISO 320 f/2.8 1/30 90mm
Moving Beyond Boring
Sometimes I use the tilt-shift technique to help tell the story of a very boring event. There’s nothing special about the geometry of the train station shown in this image, or that environment. The light is flat and ridiculously boring. The only way I would shoot this with a normal lens would be with a super telephoto lens to get all the people coming in and out of the train.
The tilt-shift lens made this very mundane situation look surreal. And it made all the little people getting in and out of the train look like miniatures. The image compels you to look at one of the most boring things known to mankind: getting on and off a train. That’s their commute every single day. There’s nothing exciting about it. The train usually shows up on time. People know exactly where they want to stand on the platform.
My challenge as the photographer was to try to make the scene a little more interesting, and that’s where the tilt-shift effects make you stop, freeze, and look, and study the image.
This photograph was very painful to make because we had to be there at 3:00 a.m. in order to get that color palette. We also had to be there to meet the cops to get the scissor lift up on the bridge before sunrise, so that we would be ready to shoot before daylight.
I could have decided to get there at 9:00 a.m., but those extra hours of sleep would have cost me the pre-dawn light and color. I would have missed the window of time when the ambient light balanced with the artificial light. And I would have lost that special brief moment just before that natural light overtakes the artificial light.
My challenge as the photographer was to try to make the scene a little more interesting, and that’s where the tilt-shift effects make you stop, freeze, and look, and study the image.
Keep in mind that you can shoot with more depth of field and a smaller aperture, but you’ll get more things in focus and the effect will be minimized.
Keeping Up with a Subject
Again from the commuting series, this is an image of the intertwining highway overpasses in downtown Los Angeles, shot from a helicopter. As I’ve mentioned, one of the biggest challenges with tilt-shift lenses is that you have to focus them manually; there are no autofocus tilt-shift lenses. So when you’re moving in a helicopter, it’s very hard to pull off focus, especially when you’re trying to follow a subject. But when you do manage to do it, it makes for a very unique image.
I was trying to follow a very small bus, which you may or may not be able to see, and it was indeed a challenge. What you will notice here is how the tilt-shift effect is lessened because it was shot at f/5.6 versus f/2.8. So keep in mind that you can shoot with more depth of field and a smaller aperture, but you’ll get more things in focus and the effect will be minimized.
Nevertheless, when you shoot wide open, there’s absolutely no room for error—in fact, what I’ve tended to do is to use the live view function on a digital SLR camera and apply 10x zoom to the exact point of focus; that guarantees me that what I’m trying to get in focus is tack-sharp. Sometimes doing it with your eye through the ground glass of the viewfinder isn’t enough. That’s where the live view function can really come in handy.
Commuters make their way by car amidst the morning traffic flow on the freeways surrounding the Los Angeles, California metropolitan area.
ISO 200 f/5.6 1/1250 45mm
When Luck Meets Preparation
This is definitely one of my favorite images, mainly because it was an extremely lucky one. I made this shot at the Kentucky Derby in 2007 with a remote camera; in other words, I had to prefocus the camera and guess where the perfect point would be at the end of the race. I was actually shooting with another camera at the finish line a few hundred yards away, and a radio trigger remote fired off this camera.
What makes this image particularly lucky is the fact that I focused a few hundred yards past the finish line. It is there, at about 150 yards beyond the finish line, that the winning horse, Street Sense, and his jockey, Calvin Borel, can be seen in perfect focus. It was a moment when the stars magically lined up and I was very fortunate. Had he pumped his fist in victory a half-second earlier or later, the picture would not have come through.
When magic like that happens, I personally thank my lucky stars, and then tell everyone else that that’s exactly what I had planned and that there was no luck involved (I’m joking, of course).
The one thing I did differently is that I used aperture priority mode. This is very unusual for me because the weather at Churchill Downs is unpredictable. It tends to get rain or patchy clouds, and in this case that’s what we had.
I wasn’t sure exactly what the exposure would be at that golden winning moment, and this was a remote camera that we had to set up hours in advance. I set it to the automatic exposure mode and applied some exposure compensation to ensure that the exposure wouldn’t be inaccurate as a result of the tilt-shift lens, as it usually is. I got the image.
The 133rd running of the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2007.
ISO 160 f/4 1/800 45mm
