You look (tilt)-shifty

One of the less practical for every day use pieces of camera equipment is a tilt-shift lens.  The lens lets you tilt or shift the plane of focus so its not parallel to the lens to create a number of effects.  Normally this is used for distortion correction when shooting buildings from the vantage point of ground level or to draw emphasis to a subject.

Good versions of these lenses run upwards of $700 and thus aren’t’ exactly something I would run out to get given that its mainly used as a gimmick effect (think of how fish-eye lenses are used as a gimmick as well).

Anyways, I spent some time in Photoshop to see if I could recreate the effect to a reasonable level of success to save money.  Turns out I could.

Let me start of by saying that these photos are only meant as examples and not meant to be passed off as photojournalism in any way shape or form.  I looked through old photos I had and that’s why these all look familiar to long time readers of this blog.