Diagonal shift and landscape

Using diagonal shift for landscape composition

Shift lenses are widely used for correction of converging verticals in landscape and architectural photography.

Horizontal shift is popular for stitching images and moving the camera’s reflection out of a shot, but using diagonal shift can have distinct effects on the whole composition of the shot, and how viewers look at such images. Whilst often thought of as a tool for architectural images, diagonal shift and landscape photography go well together.

There is a basic description of diagonal shift in another short article.

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If you’re new to shift lenses, then my article about how to use lens shift may be a better starting point. It covers the basic operations of using a tilt/shift lens for shift.

• How to use lens shift

Shifting diagonally

There are two adjustments/settings most commonly used with shift lenses. Up/down and left/right are the basic functions, usually achieved by rotating the lens body relative to its mount.

Note that vertical shift is often called rise or fall whilst left/right movement is just called shift. In my articles I refer to any lens shift movement as shift, along with the direction the lens is shifted.

The examples above are with a Mamiya 35mm M645 medium format lens used on an EOS RP with a Fotodiox tilt/shift adapter. The large amount of shift makes the direction more obvious than if I’d used one of my TS-E lenses.

The clouds, diagonal shift and landscape

One use for normal vertical shift in landscape photography with wide lenses is to lower the position of the horizon, without making trees at the edge of the frame lean inwards.

This view of a big sky in South Park in Colorado (yes, a real place) has had the bottom cropped off, but the fence posts show a distinct lean (EF 14mm lens).

Add in a few trees and the effect can be very noticeable.

This seascape (Northumberland coast) shows the view with a level camera and no shift with a 24mm lens (Review: Canon TS-E24mm)

Now I simply shift the lens upwards, keeping the camera level.

A simple pan of the camera to the right moves the lighthouse more to the left

I’m a bit closer to the water here, but note how the clouds have a general left right symmetry to them.

However, pointing the camera towards the lighthouse and diagonally shifting to the right gives a distinctly different balance to the sky.

A different shot, a bit further back from the water, but with left diagonal shift changes the ‘direction’ of the clouds, or at least the sense of direction.

The left/right elements of the diagonal shift could of course be used to obtain multiple images to stitch together.

There are some architectural examples of diagonal shift in my recent review of the Laowa 20mm F4 shift lens.

Scale and emphasis

Using the diagonal shift lets you change the emphasis for different parts of the image. My own use of diagonal shift and landscape photography is mostly about this perceived additional change in horizontal perspective, as opposed to the straightforward vertical perspective uses of correcting leaning vertical objects with vertical shift.

These two examples show the effect on the sky and the boat in the ‘shifted part’ of the image

In each case, the camera is pointing towards the blue boat.

Pointing the camera

With diagonal shift, you can point the camera where you want, and then use shift to move that point elsewhere in the frame.

I hope these few examples have been of interest – I’ll be returning to aspects of this in future articles looking at aspects of composition. There are some example video clips in a short collection of examples of shift use

Diagonal shift and landscape photography go well together. It’s a great tool for adjusting the feel of your composition, but takes a fair bit of practice before you start noticing where it would (and would not) be of use.

One other thing – you do not need a tripod to use a tilt/shift lens – all shots in this article were taken hand held.

Related videos

Basic diagonal shift