The One World Trade Center tower, occupying its place in the lower Manhattan skyline.

Enough pixels to reach the sky at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49291055921/

#photography

In this house, we follow the Scheimpflug rule.

#photography nerditry.

Let's talk camera movements for a bit.

Most cameras have a lens mounted at a fixed position exactly parallel to the film/sensor plane. There are two lens controls: focus and aperture. Focus (controlled by moving the lens toward or away from the sensor) affects how far away from the lens the plane of sharpest focus is, which is parallel to the sensor. Aperture controls how "deep" this plane of sharp focus is, as well as how bright the image will be.

But there's more...

View cameras - the classic "old school" camera design with a bellows - have two additional kinds of controls besides focus and aperture. They incorporate the ability to "shift" and "tilt/swing" the lens with respect to the film/sensor, in addition to the usual forward and backward focus control. This lets you control the geometry and focus of the captured image in ways not possible on "regular" cameras.

And that makes some interesting things possible. ...

First are shift controls. They're used to avoid geometric distortion caused by perspective. Most cameras look "straight ahead", such that you're photographing the middle of whatever's in front of the lens. Say you want to photograph a tall building. Normally you have to tilt the camera upward, which causes "keystoning", where the sides of the building converge toward the top. Shift controls let you keep the camera pointed straight ahead, allowing geometrically accurate photos like this:

While shift affects the *shape* of the image, the "tilt/swing" controls affect the *focus*. Tilt and swing move the lens away from being perfectly parallel to the film/sensor. This makes the plane of focus no longer be equidistant from the sensor across the frame. This can be used to either put more things into focus (e.g., a deep field of flowers), or, perhaps more interestingly, highlight very selective focus on a small region, in ways that go beyond what you can do with aperture alone.

Anyway, these controls open some interesting creative possibilities that are hard, inefficient, or simply impossible to replicate post-capture (e.g., in Photoshop). They can be tricky to master at first, but they quickly become second nature after you use them for a while.

Finally, what's this Scheimpflug rule? The Scheimpflug rule (it's fun to say) gives you the relationship between the tilt/swing angle of the lens and the angle of the plane of focus. The Wikipedia page will give you a lot of equations and details, but in practice, it just involves a simple intersection of angles that's fairly easy to ballpark by eye once you understand what's going on.