Using the tilt-shift lens

This is the jigsaw from a couple of days ago, with a few more parts in place. I used it to experiment with the repaired tilt-shift adapter on the Olympus Pen F. As mentioned yesterday, Olympus don't produce a tilt and shift lens - indeed I think Only Nikon and Canon produce these lenses. T&S lenses are expensive, so using an adapter with a lens I already had (the 20mm Nikon for full frame cameras) was attractive when I bought the adapter 2 or 3 years ago, and of course with an image circle large enough for full frame it well-suited to use on the micro four thirds sensor. This was the first time I'd used it for quite a while, and follows the necessary repair to the lens itself, on which the aperture diaphragm had become stuck.

The adapter is quite well made, though it is a bit fiddly to adjust the tilt and lock it in position with the rather small knob. The biggest issue is, as mentioned previously, is that the necessary bulk of the adapter means that it can't be fitted to the micro four thirds cameras which have a central hump, as the adapter hits the projecting 'pseudo prism. However, there isn't a problem with the Pen series and those Panasonics with a flat top. Adjustment of both tilt and shift can be adjusted in orientation by twisting the lens round - there are click stops to allow it to be locked at various angles. The adjustments on tilt and shift can only be made on one side of the 'zero' point, but of course you can rotate the entire adapter through 180 degrees to move in the opposite direction.

I'm not very skilled in using T&S, and this wasn't a particularly suitable subject. Also with this very wide lens I could have achieved the necessary depth of field just by closing the lens down a bit - even at f/5.6 almost everything was adequately sharp without applying any tilt. However, now the lens and adapter are usable again I'll expect to try using it a bit more. I've never used the shift function yet.

Of course nowadays some situation where a tilt and shift was necessary can be emulated using camera features (e.g. focus bracketing, focus stacking, perspective correction) nowadays, or using Photoshop. Perhaps if these had been readily available at the time I was buying the adapter I would not have bought it, but the adapter was not all that expensive compared with dedicated T&S lenses, and I already had a lens suitable for use with it in the 20mm Nikon.

Although the adapter seems to work pretty well, my technique is poor (despite reading an ebook on the subject, and watching Vincent Laforet's video) and the lens performance seems surprisingly poor.