Tilt-shift lens for extreme depth of field

Friday 15 August 2025, 16:32 by Nando Harmsen | 2,365 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

In landscape photography, an extremely large depth of field is sometimes desirable. You can achieve this in several ways. A tilt-shift lens is one of them. It is not easy, though.

You can achieve an extremely large depth of field with a small aperture. The shorter the focal length, the greater the depth of field. If you have an APS-C or M42 sensor, you have an advantage there.

Don't have enough depth of field with the smallest aperture? Then you can use the hyperfocal distance. This means focusing at the distance where the far end of the depth of field lies at infinity.

Photographing with a tilt-shift lens on location. The aim is to get both the heath in the foreground and the waterfall in the background sharply in focus.
Do you still not have enough depth of field? Then you can use focus stacking. A series of photos with the focus point at different distances. You then combine these with software into a single photo.

There is another way: the tilt-shift lens. You can use it to correct the perspective of buildings, or to 'flatten' the plane of focus. This means you can get everything sharply in focus from front to back, even with a large aperture.

By tilting this Canon TS-E 24mm f/3,5L lens (tilt), I tilt the plane of focus. It ends up parallel to the ground.
This is the Scheimpflug principle, a difficult term for something explained in the tilt-shift course on Photofacts Academy. I had my 24mm tilt-shift lens with me during a holiday in Wales.

By tilting the lens down using the tilt function, the plane of focus tilts. This allows me to get both the foreground and background sharply in focus. In theory, this is even possible with the largest aperture.

The result of using tilt for maximum depth of field. I used a Haida circular polarising filter and a Haida ND64 neutral density filter.
There is a disadvantage, though. Everything above or below the plane of focus will become blurred. That is why I chose f/11 in this case, so that the depth of field extends above and below the plane of focus.

A requirement for using this technique is that the landscape does not have too many changes in elevation. But that is the case in the mountains. As a result, parts of the landscape may still be out of focus.

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