Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L

by Frank Sheeran

It costs a fortune (US$ 1100) and weighs a half-kilo. It's not sharp, being an SLR ultra-wide-angle in addition to spreading its meagre resolution across a medium-format image circle. However, you already know the TS-E lenses tilt and shift, so you're probably not wondering why anyone would buy one.

Physically its a solid chunk of iron with a narrow passage for light and glass down the middle. I'd stand on it on a dare, no problem. The front element is rather big and exposed, though not as bad as the Canon 14mm's that look like glass softballs. The lens volume doesn't change during focus, so it won't suck in dirt and moisture. The lens front doesn't rotate. The manual focus feel is smooth and heavy, nearly hydraulic. If I'm mugged my plan is to throw this lens at my assailant's head as hard as I can, and I won't be suprised if the lens survives longer than I do.

It has two tiny knobs for adjusting shift and tilt, two miniscule knobs that lock the positions of the first pair, and a little chrome flipper near the mount to allow rotating the lens 90 degrees either way, with detents every 30 degrees. The joins in the body to allow the tilting and shifting are well-machined and I don't expect much dust would enter the lens through them. Even if they did, the joins are behind the rear optics, so I doubt any dirt would ever get between the elements.

At f/3.5 it's not bright enough to really light up a split-circle focus aid. You have to be precisely centered on the exit pupil to get both halves illuminated. Also, the difference between in- and out- of focus on a wide-angle lens at f/3.5 is hard to aprise merely through a normal laser matte screen. Especially if you are used to having AF on and CF4 off on your EOS bodies, you will waste alot of film out of habit. (Canon L lenses all autofocus silently, so its easy to depress the shutter half-way, affirm that the viewfinder doesn't look obviously out-of-focus, finish depressing the shutter on a fuzzy scene.)

The light fall-off is pretty intense wide-open and shifted/tilted. Real photographers will use a graduated filter holder to compensate. Fake photographers like me pretend its a feature. For aligned verticals in architecture, you often shift way up, which darkens the top half of the picture - the sky and the illuminated portion of the building - just as you would want. For funky nite pix (Stadthaus and Fraumunster, right), you can shift way down to get clown perspective - which darkens the ground half fairly appropriately.

On the subject of focusing screens, Canon makes a grid screen for aligning architectural subjects -- with no manual focus aid. When their architectural lenses are manual focus only. You got to wonder what the hell which they expect you to load into your EOS-1N. I use a split circle screen, and line up horizonals on the autofocus squares. And curse Canon while doing it. Beattie/Intenscreen make almost the screen you'd want - both a grid and split - but not for EOS. (Ideally you'd want two splits so you could focus near/far compositions with tilt, like Fuji makes for the GX-680's. Ideally you'd just want a GX-680.)

This lens' maximum field of view is about the same as a 12.5-15mm lens. You only get to see about 1/4 of it at a time, but if you shift around, its all there. At full shift, the rectilinear wide-angle distortion can make normal cubic corners look like church spires. You also have to learn to enjoy looking at the mount of any filters you use on it regularly while shifted. I use a 72->77mm stepup with a Nikon wide-angle polarizer that itself is really like 85 or 90mm (it kind of steps itself down to 77mm). And alot of slides feature an arched top thanks to this.

The lens hood is vestigal at best, in order to avoid blocking the maximal field of view. They could have made an asymetric hood that protected two or three sides taking advantage that only 1/2 the picture at most can be accentuated. But in practice you're outside, shifting up, so the top of the hood (where the flare's coming from) would have to be the least-hooded side anyway. Depressing. Also at 24mm/3.5, any dust on the front element will be alot nearer to in-focus, so instead of lowering contrast undetectably, dirt will walk out of your photo and introduce itself when illuminated by stray light.

The internal flare's not awful. In the night shot of Zurich's Fraumunster at the beginning, you can see alot of flare - but this was something between 8 and 30 seconds into car headlights and high-intensity spots. Much less than that and you won't see it. Note: the flare I'm talking about isn't the huge glow around the lights. Thats the once-a-decade monster fog that dragged me out of the house in the first place. Here, I'm referring to the lines of tiny colored circles that stretch from a bright light source to the center of the picture and past it. Look hard in this picture and they're there.

The little TS works with a Canon teleconvertor, creating the world's worst 35mm f/5 or 50mm f/7 lens for only $1500. Shift is also multiplied from 11mm (about 1/2 the verical picture) to 16mm and 22mm respectively. I wish I had the attention span to determine whether the TC's are any better than cropping in this case, but the accompanying bell tower is obviously still recognizable (especially to KU alum...) If this was a full-frame shot without the TC it would look as pointed as a steeple.

Ownership

The first thing to think about doing with your new TS-E is to send it right back to Canon to have the tilt and shift put in the same plane. It ships so that if the shift is up and down, the tilt is left and right. I think they converted mine free, at the same time they were putting a thumbprint on the inside of the front element of my 75-300IS . Actually I believe you could do this yourself (the rotate, not the thumbprint). It sure looks like the lens would cleanly seperate in two halves after the removal of four screws, the halves only attached by a few wires for the diaphram. (If you try for yourself I'm sure you'll take full responsibility for any ensuing shrapnel.)

I stopped carrying my 17-35L in lieu of the TS24, because I shoot mostly in cities, rife with verticals that are either crying to be corrected or screwed up. But I find that even in party pix, you can show the huge spread on the table from a pot-luck dinner while rendering the verticals more-or-less accurately. In general, I leave the shift fully unlocked, pushing the lens up and down by hand in lieu of daintily cranking it. I leave the tilt locked and more or less alone. These locks do allow a bit of drift if you're violent with the equipment, so keep an eye on them. It sucks hard to get home from a night out shooting and see that its locked at 5 degrees.

In general I use the shift on about 80% of shots with this lens. I hardly ever use tilt, because a 24mm wide-angle already has huge DOF (especially at smaller apertures) when you want "everything in focus". The same factor limits the applicability of tilting to limit focus; you can't easily blur anything to the point of unrecognizability. A new-year's resolution is to try a bit harder on both effects, though.

If you want to try macro , tilt should actually be very handy to add or limit focus. Try the EF12 extender. The 25mm extender gives only about a millimeter between closest and infinity focus, while the closeup lenses will not have much effect (while simultaneously vignetting horribly - they're quite thick and can't keep out of the way of the 138 degree maximal field of view).

Plain Old Shots

Its always a normal 24mm lens when you want one. On the building on the left, the floor that the view is centered on is verically centered in the picture. Hence no shift. Darkened sky probably due to Nikon 77mm wide-angle polarizer hanging on a step-up ring.

Alternatives

You'll prefer Canon's EF 17-35mm f/2.8L if you think like a press reporter, and expect your subject run from three meters to one meter away and start kicking you, while you attempt to maintain frame and focus. The zoom would help you a bit, f/2.8 helps autofocus (so does having an autofocus motor), and the lens won't suck in any dust if you use it with a thin-mount skylight and spittle filter.

I'd love to try Canon's EF 24mm f/1.4L for nite-time hand-held shots; in a city nightscape you could win with 1/45 sec and f/1.6 on 3200 film. I suspect you could get a little arty blur with this lens, especially in macro shots with an EF12 or maybe 500D.

Olympus made a 24mm shift lens which is rumored to be epsilon sharper. (I doubt anyone could tell.) If you don't plan on taking the wide-angle shift with you often, you might come out ahead if you find one cheap used including a body to hold film onto the back of it with. As with the Nikons (following), shift is apparently the same as Canon, at 11mm and autofocus isn't implemented.

Nikon makes both 28mm/3.5 and 35mm/2.8 shift lenses. These are both more attractive angles of view to me. I often think of getting one of these 35mm's along with an F-to-EOS adapter; together used the pair might run $500-600 (and still focuses to infinity). You don't have tilt (at 35mm I'm sure it'd be useful, shame) and the Canon automatic aperture - you get to stop these puppies down by hand. I think you might find a crappy Nikon body cheaper than the F-to-EOS adapter, but I don't have the attention span to get that close to owning two systems. Either of these lenses could potentially knock the 24mm out of my heavy bag.

Lastly, Canon makes a TS 45mm/2.8 lens. In principle this should be fine: no wideangle distortion even fully shifted, sharper, brighter, blurry enough wide open that tilt could save your focus or shatter it (if you play to lose). I assume its as solidly built as the TS 24mm. The main thing against it is that I don't think it would end up in my camera bag. Right now I carry just the 50/1.4 for night or in the backpack. My light bag is the 28-70/2.8 and 135L, and the heavy bag is the 14/2.8, TS24, 28-70, and 70-200/2.8 and TCs. I don't see when I would want the TS 45mm with me - maybe for hiking, to get some classic near-far compositions of wildflowers and alps? Or if I had a product studio?

The surest shot for my optics purchasing dollar would be if Canon made an autofocus (no technical reason not to) tilt-shift 35mm/2.8. Knowing its real-world cousin, I'd confidently buy it on specs alone.

Where to Buy

The TS-E 24mm is stocked by Adorama, a retailer that pays photo.net a referral fee for each customer, which helps keep this site in operation.

What Next

Neil Gundel made a very good page with many actual illustrations of DOF control with tilt.

Readers' Comments

Add a comment

Sunny Hwang , July 17, 2001; 10:17 A.M.

"It's not sharp, being an SLR ultra-wide-angle in addition to spreading its meagre resolution across a medium-format image circle"

I can't believe the author didn't find this lens to be sharp. I used to use this lens to take many slides. I found this lens to be sharper than most EOS wide angle primes including 20/2.8, 24/2.8, 28/2.8, and 35/2. I used to shoot them side-by-side with the same body and film. If you don't tilt or shift the lens, you get to make an image in the middle of huge image circle. It seems to me that will help the picture to be sharper in a more consistent and uniform fashion rather than otherwise. Likewise, from my experience, this lens has plenty of sharpness left over to be used with 1.4X teleconverter. So, basically you get two tilt/shift lenses for the price of one.

Unlike the author, I found the lens hood to a pleasure to use. Because the hood goes over the front element and there is plenty of room between the hood and the front element, unlike EF 24/2.8, you can not only have a polarizing filter and hood on at the same time you can also adjust polarizing filter rather easily.

I am surprised that the author didn't find the tilt function very useful. I often found the tilt function as useful as the shift function. Even with 24mm, there are times you need that extra depth of field and shutter speed, especially with slow film and foreground subject moving due to wind. It also adds additional creative control over the image and focus.

Though it is one of heaviest EF lenses for its size, in many situations, I thought this lens was more delicate due to its weight, additional knobs, and moving parts. I think regular EF lenses will survive shocks, vibration, exposure to dust, moisture, etc. better than TS-E lenses.

One of the nice features about this lens is that focusing is extremely smooth and precise unlike other EF lenses including USM lenses. I feel that TS lenses don't need any AF, unless Canon can figure out way to make it as good with AF. You will not find any EF lenses with a better DOF scale like this one.

All in all, it is an amazing lens, and it is shame that other companies including companies that make medium format lenses don't make more lenses like this. I miss having one. I will get one again, as soon as I get enough time to shoot landscape and architecture photos again.

Andrew Grant , January 16, 2002; 06:17 P.M.

I have had this lens for about four months. I use it on a D30 digital SLR. This is like using the lens with a 1.6 teleconverter so the lens is not so wide in terms of FOV but the shift effect is greater and it does not vignette even when shifted the full amount.

The other advantage of using this lens on a D30 is you can experiment with it without wasting film. I found this very useful when mastering the tilt feature (I found the effect of the tilt to be very noticable unlike the author of the article). I eventually found out about the formulea which calculates the rotation point of the plane of focus given focal length and tilt angle. I created a spreadsheet with rows for every degree of tilt available, printed it out and put it in my camera bag. It is a very useful cheat sheet.

The shift feature is very useful for shooting multiple frames with the D30 and combining them on the computer to create hires wide angle images, probably wider than could be achieved with any other lens on the D30. Resolution of the resulting images is about 7.5MP.

As far as image quality goes, I found this lens to be very good when focused properly and not shifted too much. More extreme shifts result in softer images and some chromatic aberrations. I found my focusing accuracy was aided with an Angle Finder C.

Ovidiu Predescu , November 15, 2003; 08:24 P.M.

Andrew,

Would you mind posting some more information on how the spreadsheet helps in the field? Accurately figuring out the angle of the plane of focus, so you can extract the tilt angle, doesn't seem to be an easy task. It seems to be much easier to adjust the tilt and use the DOF preview mode on the camera.

James whitley , March 14, 2007; 07:02 P.M.

Well if the author above would leave out his hate for Canon it might have been a review that I could actually read and find out about a lens I am interested in buying. I think his review should be taken down or edited so others, like me, could actually find out more about this lens.

Mark Ci , July 31, 2008; 04:57 P.M.

For a guy who can't even get "c)" and "d)" in the correct order, you certainly are particular. As to professional quality, the author was paid the same amount for the article as you were for your comment.

Rick Denney , January 20, 2009; 12:32 A.M.

Vietnam Memorial, Washington, 24mm TSE, 5 degrees left tilt

The author prefers something less wide, and doesn't really know what to do with the tilt. Fine. The main reason I like it is because it's sufficiently wide, and unlike most such lenses for small format includes the tilt capability. Clearly, my requirements are different than his. But turning the shift and tilt to the same axis--I must look into that further.

In the ten years since this review, software has made perspective manipulation a lot easier. But tilting the lens controls the focus plane, and post-processing can't make something in focus that wasn't in focus. I completely disagree with the reviewer that a 24mm lens has sufficient depth of field to render the feature unnecessary, when evidence presented in the link below.

I've written a short article on my web page explaining the point of this lens for those who might come at this review and comment through the Photo.Net menus.

http://www.rickdenney.com/tilt_shift.htm

Rick "finding the tilt more useful than the shift" Denney

Phil Trites , April 17, 2009; 03:15 A.M.

@ Rick Denney Beautiful Shot, even what looks like might have been a bright hazy day.