Review

Shift lenses are niche lenses commonly used by architectural photographers to correct leaning verticals in tall buildings.

Canon and Nikon offer full frame shift lenses, Samyang and Laowa offer 3rd party alternatives, but at the time of writing there are no native shift lenses made for micro 4/3 cameras (this is where adaptors enter the scene).

For mounts where shift lenses are available, they are seen as specialised low volume products and priced accordingly. Third party offerings are a little cheaper, but even these are still not “casual curiosity” affordable. There are one or two vintage designs from the film era available at more reasonable prices, but generally shift lenses are a considerable investment.

A lower cost alternative to the shift lens is the shift adaptor. These are similar to the popular lens adaptors available on Amazon and Ebay and can be used to adapt lenses made for one mount to another. Unlike simple adaptors, shift adaptors also contain a shift mechanism that means you can move the lens sideways off-axis. In most cases the adaptors also rotate, so you can position the shifting mechanism so it moves the lens up, down, left or right.

More on the adaptors and suitable lenses for using with them later.

Why you might use a shift lens/adaptor

By far the most common use of the shift lens is to correct converging, leaning vertical lines in architectural photography.

Buildings are often so tall that to fit the top into the frame we have to tilt the camera upwards. This results in vertical lines that we know are straight appearing to converge towards the top of the frame and the well known “building fallng over backwards” look we’ve all seen.

To render the verticals true, we have to keep the camera level. A shift lens or shift adaptor allows us to do this. To get the top of the building in the frame, we shift the lens upward instead of tilting the camera.

Shift lenses can be used for other purposes as well such as shift-stitching (flat stitching), shifting down to frame foregrounds without pointing the camera down, even shifting sideways to avoid the reflection of the photographer appearing in the frame. But perspective correction of verticals is the most common use.

How to fix those verticals

The lens or adaptor will have a knob or lock button that allows the lens to slide upwards. When you shift the lens upwards (keeping the camera levelled), it brings the top of the building into the frame. And because the camera remains level, verticals also remain level.

Shift lens optics

Shift lenses are designed to deliver an optical circle significantly larger than the size of the sensor. This extra coverage provides the space to shift the sensor around without vignetting. If you use an adaptor, you obviously need to supply a lens with a larger coverage than the sensor size. For a micro 4/3 camera, a full frame lens makes good sense or possibly a medium format lens. Either will provide a more than adequate optical circle for shifting.

Shift adaptors

Shift adaptors are available for many mounts. Fotodiox make a range of tilt & shift adaptors for micro 4/3 fit up to medium format digital. Kipon also make tilt/shift, and shift only models.

Note: When choosing an adaptor, you need to be careful to ensure that it is compatible with the form factor of your camera model. It is quite common for cameras with large grips or protruding prism or flash housings to foul the shift mechanism when used in certain orientations. Sometimes the adaptor won’t even mount because the shift knob is obstructed by part of the camera.

I have an older Kipon shift only Olympus OM mount to micro 4/3 shift adaptor. I believe this style of adaptor may still be available and it is a little cheaper than the newer Tilt & shift adaptors.

My particular adaptor is very simple. Aside from the lens release button, it has one control, a knurled gold coloured knob for shifting the lens. Maximum shift is 10mm and it has a scale so you know how much you have shifted.

The adaptor will only shift in one direction, but you can rotate the whole mechanism to shift left, right, up, down and even across diagonals (assuming you have a camera where the knob doesn’t hit the body).

The newer tilt & shift adaptors (they look similar to the long running German made Mirex adaptors) look bulkier and perhaps there is more risk of fouling with these. The only way to be absolutely sure is to try one.

Choosing old lenses for shift use

There is no particular reason why you can’t use any focal length for shift lens photography, but they seem to be most useful in shorter focal lengths simply because your most common need for a shift lens is to avoid tilting the camera up to squeeze a tall building into the frame and the wider the lens, the better.

Micro 4/3 is not always the best format for adapting old full frame wide lenses. The 2x crop factor compared to full frame makes It is difficult to find lenses with a short enough focal length and obtaining a true wide field of view from an adapted lens is a challenge. I have a Cosina 24mm and a Tamron 17mm. The Cosina behaves like a standard lens and the Tamron like a moderate wide when adapted.

I’d like a wider lens (12mm would give a full frame 24mm equivalent) but there are not a lot of options. You may struggle to find an inexpensive ultra wide option. I’m considering the old Sigma 12-24mm film era lens.

You need to give some consideration to the aperture ring arrangement – shift adaptors have no electronics and won’t be able to control electronic aperture mechanisms. Old-style Nikon lenses with mechanical aperture rings are a good bet.

Alternative to shift lenses/adaptors

The obvious alternative is software correction. Many image editors have tools for correcting the shape of an image; some are able to automatically identify horizontal and vertical lines and distort the frame to render these straight.

The downside of software correction is that it involves interpolation and cropping. You may lose a lot of pixels or find you can’t achieve the composition you want because the software has chopped off part of the image, or you have empty black bars where it has twisted the image shape. Sometimes it appears to work OK, but there is a subtle “wrongness” about the corrected geometry.

I find that using a shift lens for major corrections, then tweaking slightly in post is a good compromise and leads to more plausible, natural looking results.

Example images

These two images of Beckenham Place Park mansion house were shot using the in EVF horizon tool to ensure that camera was perfectly levelled and applying upward shift on my Kipon shift adapter. The shift brought the building fully into the frame, while maintaining mostly straight verticals and preventing “the falling over backwards” look you get when you have to tilt the camera upwards.

The image below also features upward shift, but was done for a different purpose. There were two distracting cars parked immediately in front of this attractive cottage with its unusual decorative trees. I wanted to exclude them from the shot. I could do this by tilting the camera upwards ensuring the cars were below the bottom of the frame, but then I would suffer converging verticals. Instead, I chose to keep the camera level and apply upward shift until the cars were below the frame. This preserved the straight verticals.

The two shots below taken in London’s docklands regeneration region, were shot using a shift adaptor. But instead of using it to avoid point the camera upwards, I used it to include the close foreground without pointing the camera downwards. This was done using downwards shift, while keeping the camera level. This technique avoids odd distortions of the vertical lines in the buildings.