Olympus Shift lens test

It all looks fine but from an instructional aspect what would be worthwhile is a shot from the same distance and place with a non-shift 35mm lens. I suspect that at this distance and given height of the building a 35mm non shift might give a very similar picture but I could be quite wrong

I used Canon's shift with F1... one feature, probably in Olympus as well, was that it was anamorphic...you could use it to widen an image without changing field of view. Was useful for copying purposes...filling a slide's frame with a subject that was too narrow otherwise.


Mine got stolen and I couldn't afford to replace it.

Thanks, jtk, I had not realised this. This is all new to me. I did some research after seeing your comment but what I found related to movie films whereby the image is squeezed on 35mm film then unsqueezed to fit the appropriate wider than normal cinema screen. How does this work with a still single frame Is it a question of literally squeezing more of the scene into the same frame from the same field of view and what does this do to the scene in terms of appearance?

@pentaxuser I suspect hardly anbody knew about anamorphic potential though it was explained in the official info...I bought mine for perspective control. I'd been doing architectural work, was young and thought it'd be fun. Turned out rarely to be useful except for copy work where it could "unsqueeze" to expand the image within the 35mm frame....distorting the image, perhaps unnoticed, while remaining exceptionally high resolution. Could have been used the opposite way, as you described, if one had an anamorphic Carousel projection lens,

So the anamorphic lens does "squeeze" and that is the way it will appear on the 35mm frame. However depending on the subject this may not be noticed but to unsqueeze the image for a print you would presumably require a special anamorphic enlarger lens? This presumably applies to copy work as well. Have I got this right? Can such enlarger lens be obtained and if so at what cost? Unless the answers to these two questions are (a) yes and (b) quite cheaply then you have a lens in which the anamorphic aspect is largely a waste of time?

Again have I got this right?

Thanks

When photographing a subject that isn't quite 2x3 (might be 4x5 for example) one may sometimes be able to stretch that image to fill 2x3 frame. Rarely useful, but I actually did it a few times for commercial slide shows in order to maintain full frame visual continuity.

Prints would be irrelevant as this was a professional application.

I'm sure somebody could come up with a fun-house-mirror optic to counteract the stretch. The Canon lens was exquisitely sharp... perhaps if the stretched frame was rotated 90deg and copied using the PC lens on very short extension tube, maybe the anamorphic would un-stretch the image...or perhaps the stretch could be printed to a certain size, then copied... Try that

I didn't mean to suggest that an anamorphic Carousel lens exists, but Buhl could have easily made one, based on their super-wide rear projection lens.

I would like to see another photo where the shift lens came into its own. Like you I feel there would not be a lot of difference this shot and one taken with a normal 35 mm lens. I bought the Olympus 35 mm shift lens second hand many years ago and I must confess that I can only recall 1 photo that I used it for.
PS I like your photo and the range of tones captured.

OK -- I will see if I can show another photo taken just before this one -- a TALLER Church with Spire -- I had to use 'Maximum Shift'
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/25850987@N03/44002233582/in/dateposted-public/]

That's a much better example of the shift lens working at it's best. Thanks Peter.