Tilt-shift, a DIY guide - part 1, Introduction

Mini-manifesto

Selective-focus with tilt-shift lenses has been around for many years, but I think its creative potential for both photo and video (beyond miniaturisation!) lies largely untapped. By publishing this tutorial I'm hoping that it gets picked up by those of you with real creative talent, and from there you can take it somewhere completely new.

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how tilt-shift miniature photography works and why it looks so strangely convincing? Have you ever wanted to have a tilt-shift lens but couldn't afford the hundreds of dollars needed to buy one? Have you ever wanted to take real tilt-shift photos? Then this short introduction to tilt-shift photography and DIY tilt-shift lens building is probably for you.

You might have recently seen photographs and video in which real scenes appear to take on a toy-set like appearance. This is commonly achieved by the creative use of a tilt-shift lens - however, this is only a small part of what these lenses are capable of. The extraordinary level of focus control allows you to precisely pick out subjects with a narrow depth of field both close to and extremely far from the camera. Fortunately, you don't need to spend hundreds (even thousands!) of dollars to have a tilt-shift lens in your camera bag. This tutorial goes over how selective focus effects work and are used, and offers a guide to building several different types of tilt-shift lenses all for much less than US$50.

It's even possible to create lenses that will permit you to create tilt-shift miniature videos (TODO: VID!)

In this tutorial, I'm going to go over how tilt-shift photography works, and go over a few introductory designs to put you on the path to DIY tilt-shift lens building. You can get started by looking at how tilt-shift works by clicking here (TODO: INTERNAL LINK).

I'd highly recommend looking at how tilt-shift works first, but if you'd like to go straight to the DIY part of the tutorial, click here. (TODO: INTERNAL LINK)

Thanks

I'd like to acknowledge John Swierzbin for all his help and suggestions for getting this work accurate and correct, as well as Briony Joshi and Florian Kainz for all their help with proofreading and suggestions.