First Outing With A PC-E 45mm Nikkor Tilt Shift Lens
So today I had a chance to go out and just have a bit of fun trying to re acclimate myself to the idea of tilting and manipulating the focus plane on a camera. Its been a couple years since school where I used a 4×5 camera regularly. My thoughts so far on this lens. (and again, this is my first day using it, so I expect these to change over time)
1. It is much more difficult to fine tune the focus plane using tilting on a digital camera than a 4×5. Even when using Live View and magnification on my Nikon bodies, I find it it more difficult than focusing on the ground glass of a 4×5.
2. Was slightly disappointed by the limited amount of tilt possible
3. I am very happy with the stiffness of the focus ring. It makes critical focusing, and making smooth focus changes in video very easy. It is also silent, which is great for shooting video
4. Kind of bummed that the lens can not tilt and shift on the same axis. For me, this would have been better since I will primarily be using this for landscape and product photography. I plan to look into the cost and process of having Nikon modify the lens so it will tilt and shift on the same axis.
5. Controls are a little awkward, but I expected this. Larger locking screws would have been nice. I also feel like it would be easy to accidentally over-tighten them and somehow break them.
6. Build quality is excellent.
7. Automatic aperture control on modern Nikon bodies makes this lens less frightening to use, but its nice to have a huge rubberized button right on top of the lens to cancel this so you can get a feel for things. Basically I use it as an alternative DOF preview button.
8. I assumed that this would be a 2.8 fixed aperture lens, but I quickly learned that close-focusing gives me a max f-stop of 3.8. No problem for me, but maybe an important spec for some shooters.
9. The leather pouch that comes with the lens is kind of corny, and I don’t really see much use for it.
10. The lens is SHARP!
In true tilt/shift fashion, I had to try to make my own “miniature” video. Unfortunately, Sacramento doesn’t have a whole lot of interesting things to miniaturize, and has even less (accessible) high vantage points, so this is a pretty sorry attempt at copying the dozens of other tilt shift vids out there. It was fun to try though.
More soon.
Update:
Selling my PC-E Nikkor 45mm lens. Excellent price in my opinion. Lens is virtually “like new” out of the box. Only used a couple of times. All original materials and docs.
- Nikon-45mm-f-2.8D-ED-PC-E-Micro-Lens
It’s yours for $1750 or you can duke it out by bidding.
