The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

SHIFT

A shift lens, otherwise known as a perspective control lens, or PC for short, borrows from the same camera manufacturing ideas as does the tilt on the previous pages. In other words, it came originally from large-format cameras, which were big enough to be able to move around the front and the back (known respectively as the front standard and the back standard). Shifting is actually a simpler operation, both mechanically and optically. The lens slides up, down, or sideways, but stays in the same plane. This slides different parts of the scene into the frame, but it depends on having a lens that projects an image circle larger than the sensor. This is not something that normally concerns camera manufacturers or photographers: All you need ...