When you want to go cheap, you’d better be able to build your own devices. For most photographers, a tilt-shit lens is often too expensive for something that you’ll nearly never use. So, why not build your own tilt-shift lens from cheap plumbing parts?
Bhautik Joshi did exactly that. $10 for the whole project, including the lens mount, plus a manual focus lens (less than $50 on will open the doors to architecture and special effects only available to tilt-shift. If you accept quality limited by your ability with tools and crafts.
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2 responses to “DIY tilt-shift lens”
I used the same plumbing technology to build my own slide duplicator.
As I did not want to put my hardly earned money in a new one, I bought a full frame slide duplicator on eBay for 5 euros. Since my camera is an APS, the lense was too close to the rear mount, the slide mount was too close to the lense. Moving the lense closer to the rear mount was easy (just had to reverse-mount the lense internally), but the slide mount was still too close to the lense and out of focus. So I torn the slide mount apart, and added a small PVC pipe to lengthen the distance between the lens and the mount. As the PVC pipe diameter did not exactly match the original design and was a bit loose, I secured it with a metal clamp. This allowed some flexibility to perfectly adjust the focus.
Since then I digitized more than 4000 old slides from the 60s, and I’m perfectly happy with it.