In the past year tilt shift photography, which primarily was used in photographing architecture and landscapes, has become a regular lens for the wedding photographer.  I use this lens a lot in my wedding photography and get a ton of questions on how and why I use this lens.  I thought it would be appropriate to do a blog post explaining and answering all the questions.

First for a little geek talk.  With a normal lens the image plane, lens plane and object plane are all parallel, so all in focus objects are the same distance from the camera or sensor or whatever you want to capture your image on.  The tilt-shift lens has two main functions.  The tilt which is the rotation if the lens plane relative to the image plane.  The shift which is the movement of the lens plane parallel to the image plane.  Tilting the lens changes the orientation of the plane of focus which determines the part of the image that will be sharp.  Shift is used to change the line of sight while avoiding converging lines, like when shooting tall buildings that you don't want to looked warped.  To those who really want to geek out take a look at the Scheimpflug Principle.   

It is basically this, by tilting the lens you can create a wedge shaped DOF and isolate your subject by being the only thing in the image that is in focus.  I am not going to deal much with the shift function because I never use it when photographing couples.  I only use the tilt function. 

I primarily use this lens to isolate my subject by what is in focus in the image.  There are times when you are in a location and the location is nothing to see so I will tilt the lens and make the only visible in focus part of the image the subjects that I am shooting.  There are also times when there are really cool lines in the surrounding but would look better a little more abstract and there I will also tilt the lens.  All in all I think it is only appropriate to do if you are using this lens to further draw the eye into the subject of the photo.  To just tilt for the sake of tilting makes a horrible photo.  Also because the lens can rotate on the body of the camera you can make the DOF or POF horizontal and vertical.  This lens is a manual focus lens so it can be a bit tricky at first.  I totally recommend getting it and playing with it and finding ways to add a cool look to your images.  It is also a very cool thing to use while your subjects is moving but you must get the manual focus thing down pretty good for that.   

I am going to give a few examples of how I use this lens to give you an idea of how cool it can be.