THE POWER OF PERSPECTIVE CONTROL LENSES – PROLURE ST72 MINNOW RAINBOW TROUT

Perspective Control Lenses or Tilt Shift have always been my favourite lens for product work, nothing comes close to their unique design and abilities based on the Scheimpflug principle

These lenses enable photography to transcend the normal restrictions of depth of field and perspective. In this case this lure is lying flat on the shooting table, the camera is at 30 degrees to the subject. No matter what F stop is chosen on your lens/camera it cannot produce an image that is precisely in focus along its length. This image was shot on pure white acrylic at f11, approximately 20cm away using a NIKKOR PC-E Micro Nikkor 85mm f2.8D, at this setting the normal DOF is 0.2cm, but by using the tilt and shift function, DOF is infinite, thus a perfectly full focus image.

Lately I’ve had several people say just do stacking, while it may work, it still will not attain perfect detail and taking a series of images and merging them in software takes time and that is something I just don’t have.

So to me the NIKKOR PC-E Micro Nikkor 85mm f2.8D is my perfect lens. They are a super expensive, take a long time to learn and dedication to use correctly. Simple understanding of photography vs mathematics vs light is essential to their use. Even simple principles of exposure change like as soon as you tilt or shift, exposure needs to be adjusted whether that be slowing the shutter down or increasing flash power to compensate, that is just one of the challenges.