How often do you tilt for Theo?

[Vaughn]

...How big of a deal is it really? Would you say it's essential or just a near trick you do sometimes if you have objects close by in the composition?

My camera does not have zeroing indents, so I am in the habit of using all the movements all the time -- it is just some of the settings are at or near 'zero'. It is all about how it looks on the GG!

[David A. Goldfarb]

For architecture, I tend to use only rise/fall and shift (except when using parallel tilt on both standards to get indirect rise/fall beyond what the camera allows), because buildings and structures tend to have flat surfaces at right angles that don't benefit from tilt or swing, or there may be parallel planes at different distances, and if you use rear tilt to make one facade square, the others farther away or nearer will not be square. Ansel Adams made a photograph illustrating the latter effect, shooting a church through an archway that is actually at an angle to the facade of the church, and the church is square, but the archway is skewed like something from a surrealist nightmare (which isn't always a bad thing, actually).

I'm more likely to use tilt and swing for landscapes, but usually the amount needed is subtle, rarely more than 5 degrees, and often just 1 or 2. If you've got a landscape where the ground is a flat plane and there is some tall object like a tree or a rock formation in the foreground or midground, tilt won't help usually, and you have to think of it as an architectural subject.

Here's a typical subject that uses front tilt:



The 4x5" camera with a 75mm lens is pointed downward, and I've got a tiny amount of front tilt, maybe 1 degree, to bring the foreground, the ocean surface, and the rock in the distance into sharp focus. My notes from this period are inaccessible at the moment, but I'm fairly sure I would have been using a center filter, so the aperture is probably f:22-32.

[Cor]

I wrote:

I recently tried to get a ploughed bare field and distant tree lines all in focus with tilt..could not get it working and resorted to stopping down with the 90mm lens to f32, which solved it

On which Doremus replied:

@Cor: The situation you describe is tailor-made for using tilt! If you can't get the flat plane of the ground in focus using tilt, then something is quite wrong. It should be really easy and the basic tilt application. Maybe I don't understand your situation exactly...

I see now I did not take a good example. I have used tilt successfully in similar (but not the same!) situation. It was a field with chopped off maize sticks (in winter) and a barren single tree about 300 meters away. I used a 150 mm lens and I tilted such a degree so the plane of sharp focus started on one of those maize chops (about 5 meters away from me) and the middle of the tree. Stopping down rendered the whole tree sharp (alas the upper branches not due to strong wind).

The situation I was referring to above was a bit different, mainly because I choose my 90 mm lens (for the perspective effect I wanted), wanting to have the ploughed flat field from about 50 cm from my tripod all the way to the tree line about 750 meter away in sharp focus.

My camera has limited tilt, and the bellows started to vignette, so it was more a problem of my lens choice (and in hindsight my unnecessary decision to keep the back panel level) than tilt on it self.

Best,

Cor

[ROL]

How annoying.

Yeah, all this time I thought it was Jerry Scheimpflug. I will tilt for beers on occasion.

[Sibben]

Yeah, all this time I thought it was Jerry Scheimpflug. I will tilt for beers on occasion.

Yeah, Jerry was the other brother who invented shoes made of cheese. His work is largely forgotten today.

[C. D. Keth]

Theo, short for Theodor Scheimpflug.

Yeah, nobody says that.

[Lenny Eiger]

I like DOF. I use tilts all the time, but its usually very little. Mostly I use the lens all the way closed down. Life is much happier that way. (at least for me.)

Lenny

[Drew Wiley]

I use some kind of view camera movement virtually every single shot, mostly front or rear tilt, sometimes swing, often rise or fall too. ... I've never heard of shoes
made from cheese... but my grilled cheese sandwich today did smell like old shoes!

[Alan Gales]

I use some kind of view camera movement virtually every single shot, mostly front or rear tilt, sometimes swing, often rise or fall too. ... I've never heard of shoes
made from cheese... but my grilled cheese sandwich today did smell like old shoes!

I saw the Brewers play in Milwaukee the year before they tore the old Comiskey Stadium down. A lot of the fans were wearing cheese hats.

[David Lobato]

When I was brand new with 4x5 I learned that you need far less tilt than the pretzel twisted view cameras in printed ads, or in the diagrams showing angles with the Scheimpflug principle. At infinity, a 135mm lens needs only a small amount of tilt, a 210mm lens a little more so. I over-tilted the front standard so much it's a wonder I didn't quit the whole LF thing. Also, look up base tilt versus axis tilt techniques, there is a significant difference on how to effectively use each of them.