Nikon 24mm PCE lens

I was lucky enough to get a tilt shift lens for Christmas. I have a Nikon system and for some reason Nikon supplies the lens with the tilt and shift aligned at 90°. The lens needs to be sent back to Nikon who, for the princely sum of £160 will re-align it so that the tilt and shift are in the same plane.
I read that I was supposed to do this in order to get the lens to work properly for landscape photography, although my idea as to why was shaky. Now I have the lens back it makes a little more sense, but I will have to do a lot of work in order to use it correctly. The main problem using the lens with the D800 is that the locking knob for the shift, when the lens has been rotated (the front of the lens can be rotated in relation to the back of the lens), lies directly under the popup flash which makes it difficult to adjust. Fortunately I have fairly small hands.

I would strongly advise not to use this lens when out with a non photographer as they will get really, really impatient. Focusing is manual and iterative and best done on live view. You have to focus on the background and then use tilt to get the foreground in focus and then move focus points back and forth focussing and tilting until both foreground and background are perfectly focussed. This takes lots of time and I suppose will slow down any photographer and ensure that the picture that they are taking is the best composition possible (not in the case of this blog). But not so good for onlookers. Fortunately the dog is old and takes any excuse for a long sit down!
We were on the Lode walk again from Anglesey Abbey and I only took three pictures.
In the first I shifted the lens to get more of the height of the trees in and then focused on foreground and background. Unfortunately I did this in a nearly horizontal plane so that the tops of the trees are out of focus. The second is more successful as there was no shift involved and only a little tilt (1°) to get the front of the white twig in focus. Neither of these pictures have been cropped. The third was taken using hyperfocal distance with no tilt and has been cropped. The two black and white photos have been converted using Silver Efex Pro 2.








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