The month of October was a busy one for traveling with a week spent out west and then a recent trip to New York City as talked about on this blog in the past couple of days.  While I was in Northern California, I had the opportunity to have a tilt/shift lens with me.  In basic terms, tilt/shift lens allows you to position the lens in a different plane to your camera.  With the shift movement parallel lines are kept straight giving you a natural result on a building as you look up instead of converging lines.  With the tilt adjustment you adjust the plane of lens and get a result of everything on a similar focal plane.  This allows you to use larger f-stops in landscape photography which is quite useful with wildflowers as with a small f-stop a longer shutter speed results.  As some movement may occur with the flowers especially with a slight breeze you start to get motion unless you are able to use a quicker shutter speed.

One other effect which is possible is making everyday objects look like minatures with the adjustment of the tilt.  This effect is what I was using while in San Francisco and later in Napa Valley on some images I took during the trip.

Cable Car – San Francisco

Napa Valley (you can see a little smoke on the horizon from a wild fire which broke out that day north of Napa)