The last thing I needed was to buy an another lens and another camera system but I figured I’d come this far, what the hell. This time, the anecdotal reviewers said “I’m sure the Canon lens is good but I don’t see how it could be better than the Nikon.” I figured this was probably true. It’s true that many architectural photographs have nothing in the corners but sky but this isn’t always the case. And even if there is nothing but sky in the upper corners of your picture, should you accept mediocre corner sharpness? Check the price tag on these lenses and my guess is you’ll say no. And it turned out that when fully shifted, the Nikon 24 PC-E was, to be charitable, not great in the corners. A few examples were posted but as with most things on the web there was really no way to critically judge the lens’ performance, especially sharpness in the corners when fully shifted. Reviews of the Nikon 24 PC-E were raves but anecdotal people said “I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it’s great” or “Considering what it costs I’m sure it’s great”. Nikon was first, with their 24mm PC-E, several months before Canon’s 24mm TS-II (there was an earlier 24mm TS type #1 but it was from the film era and not great.) I’d owned digital point and shoot cameras, but having finally found a great PC lens for use with film cameras (the excellent Olympus 24 Shift) I decided to hold off buying a full frame digital SLR until somebody introduced a PC lens expressly designed for digital cameras. I was a latecomer to serious digital photography.

But unfortunately, it’s not great on full frame digital cameras. You can look into the front element and it will tell your fortune. Just slide the front of the lens in the direction you want. No knobs to fiddle with nothing lock or unlock. Tilting is used to control depth of field, but in practice 24mm lenses have so much depth of field it’s rarely necessary to tilt–so half of what these lenses do is stuff you don’t need to worry about! Don’t let those knobs frighten you the lenses above have knobs for shifting but there are knobs for tilting as well. There are other issues as as well, but that’s the short summary.ĭespite what has been written, PC (aka TS) lenses are extremely simple to use if you take just a few minutes to see how they operate. These lenses are far from perfect, in part because even with a large image circle, image quality is highest at the center of the circle, and shifting the lens means moving away from the center. Since the camera and subject remain parallel, the building appears to be standing straight up. This allows the lens to “see” the top of the building without the need to tilt the camera upwards–almost like a periscope. The PC lens accomplishes this by producing an image circle that is so large, the lens optics can be shifted relative to the camera sensor. PC (perspective correction) lenses, also known as Shift or Tilt/Shift lenses, are used in architectural photography to mimic the capability of a large format bellows camera to render tall buildings standing straight instead of tilting backwards.

Nikon tilt shift lens