Photography can capture subjects far beyond the capabilities of the human eye despite cameras and lenses being inferior in many ways. In most situations, there are ways to resolve most of these deficiencies, and for perspective distortion, shift and tilt-and-shift (perspective control) lenses allow us to capture linear subjects such as buildings in a natural-looking way.
For architecture photography, it’s the shift element of these lenses that’s most important because this allows us to shift the lens upwards using a mechanism to capture the tops of buildings, rather than tilting the camera back and creating converging verticals (keystoning). In a nutshell, these lenses produce a larger image circle than standard lenses, which means that they continue to create a full image on the camera sensor, even when they have been tilted or shifted.
Shift and tilt-and-shift lenses are specialist optics designed for specific purposes, but they’re
