Diane Fields said:
I suspect that practice is what it takes with the TSE's. I had it for 2 weeks plus a bit more due to the holiday weekend and was just coming to grips with it the weekend before I sent it back.
Hello, I am just about to explore the possibilities of shifting with my 5d. I rented the 45TSE for one week- end, the 24 for another one.
My observations:
- The 45TS-E is quite sharp, but can show *a lot* of CA when shifted. In many situations (architecture) it is also not wide enough.
- The 24TS-E I rented showed less CA, is sometimes (not often) too wide, but the main problem (that everyone mentions) is that it is not sharp enough, specially when shifted (more when vertically than when horizontally). I must admit that I only shot handheld, but at reasonably short shutter times, the unsharpness hadn't got anything to di with handholding or not, it is just the optical quality that is not very good, towards the edges.
I cannot say anything about tilting because I have not really tried to work it out.
So the situation is not easy. One can accept that the 24 is less than stellar and try to cope with it, or shoot with a good WA lens (non- shift) and correct it in photoshop. I did that to compare directly against the 24TS-E version and I did not find the shifted lens to be better. The huge advantage of the shift lens is that you have less work in PP and (almost) get what you see in the VF. I say "almost" because even in the large 5D viewfinder I happened to misjudge the amount of shift and "overshifted" which looks much worse than to "undershift").
So I am not yet sure if I will get one of those. The Canons are a bit expensive for a less than perfect lens. The best would be if they came out with newer updated versions of their TS-E lenses to adapt to the more demanding digital environment of today.
Otherwise - and this is my question I atually have - I will look for a possibly perfectly corrected normal lens for stitching several frames together. I now use the Tamron 28-75 which is sharp but has a very irregular moustache distortion and with several frames you get - in the stitched version - a final image that has strange distortion that is practically impossible to correct.
So, again my question: Which one would be a Canon lens that has "no" or almost no distortion? The 50mm 1,8 has distortion.
Thanks, Bernie