Landscapes and Waterscapes @ Stanley Ferry

With a 17mm Tilt Shift Lens

I’ve had a flurry of outings to get used to the new lenses – this trip was to the Stanley Ferry area just outside Wakefield, in West Yorkshire. I’d started out looking for decent wheat fields, but they were not lit that well with the sun – just looked like overgrown lawns, or like this next shot, have plastic all over them

So I tried a black and white – this is with the 17mm TSe lens and a perfectly level camera…. not that you could tell in the unlevel Yorkshire countryside.

Here is a wheat field and it wasn’t really that great – though the TILT function on the lens has got the nearest wheat stalks and the distance pylons sharp. It does increase your depth of field lots

Onwards to Stanley Ferry Marina

So on my way back home, I pulled off the M62 as I knew the Stanley Ferry area may look nice at sunset. This is a level shot to give and overview – the sheds opposite make and fix boats, and in the distance is the arch aqueduct. The canal flows over a river!

Shift Panoramic

This is the coolest use of the TS lens – you can do panoramic shots by taking 2 or more shifted shots. That means you twist a knob on the lens to slide the lens up and down – so here we have 3 photos – one was mainly sky, one was the bridge and the 3rd was mainly the water and path.

Individually they’re ok – but together they look pretty cool. The angle of view is immense.

This one is from the other side of the bridge – the light this direction wasn’t sunlit and cool. Again it’s a panoramic of 3 shots

Here’s the overview shot a little later – before I ventured to the other side of the Stanley Ferry Bridge

The other side of the Stanley Ferry Bridge

Here’s the bridge for starters. It’s a road bridge with a pipe bridge next to it… not very sexy really.

But look the other way on a nice evening, and you get this lovely English landscape – with a swan too. Loved the result of this image, bearing in mind you can’t really add a polariser to this lens, the sky came out beautifully blue and textured. This is another panoramic, a perfectly level camera and 3 shots shifted to capture the foreground AND sky. 

So having tried a tilt shift on landscapes – would I recommend one?

Definitely…. if you’ve got patience, it takes a while to set up and compose shots.