This review was not that terrible. It doesn't happen to actually provide any useful information about this versus any other tilt shift lens... But for what is probably the target audience of people who have never heard of such a thing, it does a mediocrely okay job. Yes, it leaves out about 3/4 of the uses of a tilt shift lens. But I at least didn't notice anything flat our blatantly WRONG with what was said.
And importantly, the example photos included only a single obvious miniaturization photo. The rest are very nice tasteful reasonable selective focus images. So that right there puts it several steps above the worst T/S reviews I've seen.
That said, it needs to be way better written, explain shifting (which didn't come up at all...), and explain the other half of what you use tilting for (extending focus, rather than minimalizing it).
Well, certainly the same geometric principles apply to selective focus. But when we talk about Scheimpflug it's usually about sharpness.
The Scheimpflug principle is simply how the focal plane moves relative to the lenses angle to the focal plane. It implies nothing at all about how you use it creatively, and all of the examples in the review are indeed demonstrating the Scheimpflug principle. It would have been nice to link to the wiki for it at least, though, rather than just throwing up a stick figure drawing with no real explanation...
I have some philosophic reservations about using a t/s lens for selective focus, for me it's throwing out information - selective focus should be performed in post. But, I also can appreciate why someone would do this optically.
Uh, what? This makes no sense to me. Selective focus cannot be replicated in post processing like in a T/S and more than extended/lined up focus can be, because the blurring amount depends on the distance of objects from the plane of focus. For instance, if you are on top of a parking garage, and you shoot a street with a plane of focus running parallel to the street just above the asphalt and use f/8, the tops of the telephone poles will all be out of focus. These out of focus pole-tops can and will fall right smack dab in the middle of the rest of the in-focus portions of the photo.
How can you mimic that in photoshop? You can't, unless you go through every object in the scene and mask it with gradients for the distance from the focal plane, which is nearly impossible. Nor is it mathematically possible to deduce full depth information from the image algorithmically (not even if you have a stereoscopic image!).
It's not just a matter of making a feathered single line selection and lens blurring it.
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