Worst. Lens. Review. Ever !!!

I think it is a good review. I enjoyed it. I do not own a tilt shift lens... Kinda knew what it did. I think he did a great job of explaining. Not all people are at the same level and not all people fall into the perfectionist category, which I imagine you do. When i explain things, i generally want to clearly get the point across and details like a high quality photo of the lens i am talking about would be a waste of time. He looses no credibility for picture quality, because that was not his point. I admit, he got me interested in getting one. I have 12 or 14 FX lenses. JD
 
I think it is a poor review mainly because the reviewer shows that he doesn't have much of a clue about the operation, uses and, importantly, the limitations of that particular lens. He could have shortened his review to 'gee whiz' without losing any useful information.

"Tilt shift lens are a bit of a mystery when you first start using them. What is this “shift” knob and should I “tilt” and “shift” at the same time? Which directions and for what purposes?"


The line above is what got me. You would think someone would understand those points before spending that much money on a tool.


 
I think it is a good review. I enjoyed it. I do not own a tilt shift lens... Kinda knew what it did.

Yeah, duh. It's a $2000 lens that can make things look tiny! WOOoT
 
I think it is a poor review mainly because the reviewer shows that he doesn't have much of a clue about the operation, uses and, importantly, the limitations of that particular lens. He could have shortened his review to 'gee whiz' without losing any useful information.

"Tilt shift lens are a bit of a mystery when you first start using them. What is this “shift” knob and should I “tilt” and “shift” at the same time? Which directions and for what purposes?"


The line above is what got me. You would think someone would understand those points before spending that much money on a tool.




Unless the user is the tool...
 
I think it is a poor review mainly because the reviewer shows that he doesn't have much of a clue about the operation, uses and, importantly, the limitations of that particular lens. He could have shortened his review to 'gee whiz' without losing any useful information.

"Tilt shift lens are a bit of a mystery when you first start using them. What is this “shift” knob and should I “tilt” and “shift” at the same time? Which directions and for what purposes?"


The line above is what got me. You would think someone would understand those points before spending that much money on a tool.




Unless the user is the tool...

had a little bit of downtime before a shoot and decided to take a look at where this thread ended up since last year. it's hilarious yet sad to me how many of you have nothing better to do than to make the most boring arguments imaginable.

maybe try shooting more and interneting less.
 
Camera enthusiasts would NEVER spend $2000 on a tool that they have no clue how to use. That's ridiculous. This guy must be insane.
 
Camera enthusiasts would NEVER spend $2000 on a tool that they have no clue how to use. That's ridiculous. This guy must be insane.

I am assuming you are attempting to be sarcastic? Since it happens with all the "Aspiring Pro's" (buying expensive bodies and lenses they don't know how to use!)
 
"Tilt shift lens are a bit of a mystery when you first start using them. What is this “shift” knob and should I “tilt” and “shift” at the same time? Which directions and for what purposes?"


The line above is what got me. You would think someone would understand those points before spending that much money on a tool.




Unless the user is the tool...

had a little bit of downtime before a shoot and decided to take a look at where this thread ended up since last year. it's hilarious yet sad to me how many of you have nothing better to do than to make the most boring arguments imaginable.

maybe try shooting more and interneting less.

Bringing up old dead threads....

maybe try shooting more and interneting less.
 
Bringing up old dead threads....

maybe try shooting more and interneting less.

He did create the blog post that the thread was about FYI.
 
I went back to the blog post on the 45 PC-E Nikkor. One of my favorite comments was this one: "The core casing is mostly metal from what I can tell and being that it's a strictly manual focal lens they made the focus wheel gigantic and smooth."

The focus "wheel"? How come none of my lenses have gigantic, smooth focus wheels?

If the typos in the blog post were corrected, and the grammatical and capitalization errors were eliminated, and the proper terminology regarding lenses were to be used,then perhaps the "review" would not be held up to ridicule.

Read more: Gear Review: Nikon 45mm f/2.8 PC-E Lens"
 
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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