Nikon 85mm f/2.8D PC-E

Nikon’s newest perspective control lens with full tilt, shift, and rotation capabilities. Shift range is plus or minus 11.5 mm and tilt plus or minus 90 degrees, providing superb perspective correction for architectural shots, panoramic shots, and for special effects. It has auto aperture control on D3, D700, and D300 cameras.

If you’re not familiar with them, mastering a perspective control lens is not something that can be accomplished in an hour or two. If you do not have experience with this type of lens, you will need a day or two with the manual to practice before tackling an important assignment.

Roger’s Take: Its true that mastering a tilt-shift takes a lot of practice. I’m not sure how much yet. But doing useful things with one, like using tilt to control depth of field is simple and gives you those images where everything from the camera to infinity appears in focus. With the 85mm that’s commonly used for product photography, keeping the entire area of interest in equally sharp focus without stopping down to f16 and getting diffraction softness. BTW – the last sentence was an entrance exam — if you didn’t understand it you can’t rent this lens. Seriously, this is a big-boy toy and I don’t want anyone else giving us a bad review because the PC-E lens they rented doesn’t autofocus very well (understandable since they are all manual focus).

Using the shift function to alter perspective for architectural photos is child’s play for those who once shot view cameras. The rest of us just play with the damn thing and chimp away (For those who don’t know what chimping is, its when you look at the shot in the camera’s LCD and go “ooh,oooh,oooh”) until we get what you want. Sometimes you’ll nail it right away. Sometimes you’ll get something with enough distorted reality to use as a Don’t Do Drugs poster. You can either throw those away, or pretend that’s what you meant to do, that you’re considering a career in fine art photography. I know. I shouldn’t use “fine art photography” and “career” in the same sentence, they have no common ground.

IMPORTANT NOTE Our associates at Diglloyd have pointed out an important point when using the Nikon PC-E lenses – the shift-lock knob MUST be locked down before focusing the shot: otherwise there is a bit of sag at the shift plate that will allow the lens to be out of alignment as discussed here.