Took my tilt shift lens and tripod to Dumbo, Brooklyn. The first scene is the street with a view of manhattan bridge and empire state building. It’s an amazing shot that everyone and their mother is there taking. There’s even guy who will take your photo with a vintage polaroid camera. I am somewhat envious every time I see a bellows camera like that. But today I’m feeling fine with my Canon TS-E 24mm F/3.5L. I am also using a Leofoto G2 geared tripod head and a Sirui travel tripod.

I place my tripod down, level my camera, and shift the lens upward. Not tilt, shift. Doing this with the shift movement allows me to recompose my shot without angling the camera upward. This is how the sides of the building and the structure of the bridge remain vertical and do not converge toward the top of the image. I used a polarizer, rotated to allow reflections on the windows, and used a very small aperture to obtain a long exposure. Exposure here was 1/5th of a second which causes the people to be blurred. I feel this gives a sense of rushing which I felt when I was there setting up this shot.

Again, I leveled my camera to keep vertical lines vertical and recomposed using upward shift. The exposure time was still very long thanks to small aperture and polarizer darkening. The family there was standing and then moved during the exposure.

The base of the bridge is made of stone. The road way has a lot of metal. It is very loud when the train crosses this bridge. Again with correct perspective.

I set up the tripod with long exposure on pebble beach. The waves and the boy skipping stones turn blurry over the long exposure time. The Brooklyn bridge is in the background. One world trade center is visible on the far right.

This brick fortress looking building housed fancy shops and a food court. There were thousands of people walking by. Over this 2 second exposure, the people blend into the background and appear ghostly. The rectangular grid of windows is maintained by perspective correction.

This is the same building with camera rotated to the left. Vertical shift is the same as in the previous shot.

Jane’s carousel in Brooklyn Bridge park is housed in a glass building. The carousel spins and the lights create round trails in my long exposure image.

In this shot, the camera is level and pointed perpendicular to the face of this building. The vertical and horizontal lines are maintained. The exposure produced nice elliptical light paths on the carousel. I love this shot.

The skating rink is nicely situated under the brooklyn bridge. I used wide open aperture and lens tilt to produce this wildly out of focus bridge while keeping some of the rink in focus. The miniature effect can be achieved with this type of lens tilt, but in this case, I think the bridge looks more surreal than miniaturized.

Dumbo Tilt Shift

Dan Snyder

Dumbo Tilt Shift

Aurora in the Northeast US

Tilting the Lens

Dan Snyder