Benny2707 wrote:gstark wrote:Glen wrote:Thanks Gooseberry and James for correcting me they were confirmed. That had 16-85 had been reaching fever pitch in the rumour department over the last 2 weeks. Will be interesting to see if Nikon has more lenses in store for 2008
Glen,
They have two more PC lenses in the pipeline.
Could we have a quick topline on the PC system and how it works? Or any TS lenses for that matter?
Benny, have you ever had a play with a large format camera? 5x4 or larger?
LF (or view) cameras are built in a very
modular way, with typically, a lens board and lens, a film back and groundglass, joined by a bellows.
These are mounted on, on
modern cameras, a monorail, but where the fun begins is that none of the components have fixed positions: you can, for instance, raise or lower the lens board, or you can shift it from left to right, all relative to the film back, which of course sits on the film plane. As well as those movements - all of which keep the lens plane parallel to the film plane - you can also tilt the lens plane forwards or backwards, or to the left or right. This of course breaks the paradigm that the film and lens planes remain in parallel.
Are you still with me?
Now, all of those movements can also be performed on the film back - at the film plane - too. Basically, you can almost have a camera that turns around and looks at itself, but that's not what it's about.
The purpose of this manifold: you can bring different parts of the image into sharp focus - Scheimpflug Principal, but check the spelling - or you can correct various types of distortion before you actually shoot the image. In this latter instance, you have most certainly seen images looking up at tall buildings, and observed converging verticals as you look up at the building.
By keeping the film and lens planes parallel to one another, bu by raising the lens plane, you change the part of the image circle that is projected onto the film plane, and in so doing, you can now make that same image of the tall building, but by looking straight at it and raising the lens board, rather than pointing the camera upwards, those converging verticals no longer converge.
Still with me?
Nearly there.
The way a TS or PC lens is built is such that it's engineered to permit different parts of the lens to move up or down, or from side to side, relative to the rest of the lens. And the lens mount.
And the focal/film plane.
Thus you have, in a film or DSLR, some of the capabilities of a view camera, but in a much more portable, and much more user friendly, package.
I've not tried to explain the actual usage of a view camera. Suffice to say it's fun, it's expensive, it's time consuming, but it's real photography.
Let me know if you want more info on this. I nearly bought myself a Toyo G when I was in HKG last year. I was very tempted, but as I would rarely use it, good sense (on a very rare occasion) got the better of me.
HTH.