Astrhori 50mm F1.4 Tilt Shift.

Astrhori 50mm F1.4 manual lens. According to the label on the box, it’s a TS lens + Miniature Landscape. If you are looking for a fun lens; it’s worth having a look at it. This is foremost a tilt/shift lens (mostly tilt ) and could double up as a portrait lens. Don’t we all love to have a 2 in 1 feature?

The most challenging part about such lenses, is to understand how it works. Sometime it could be pretty challenging to some. This is especially true to someone new to photography. Even for myself, It took me a little while to understand the mechanics of it. Once you pass this first hurdle of finding how the plane of focus works; you will be rewarded. I personally think such genre of lens is great for fine art, cityscape and landscape photography. Maybe even for video. That will be interesting.

The traditional Tilt and/or Shift lens works by shifting left or right and up or down. For Astrhori; it’s a slightly different way of approach. They uses a ball system. Once, one unlock via the closest and largest ring to the camera, you are able to tilt and shift and move to anywhere in between. Next, you will need find the plane of focus and lock it back. To find the plane of focus you need to turn the lens. It’s could turn 360 degree. I would consider this process the most challenging part. Do ensure you turn on your focus peaking. Set the aperture to F8 to have a clearer focus line to see the plane of focus.

The two other rings are for aperture and focusing. That is pretty much straight forward. The aperture ring is clickless. When I think I have nail focus, I will always punch in to double check; because many a time I do missed the focus. I guess this is the joy and sometime the pain of using a manual lens.

This T/S lens is great controlling the plane of focus.

Here is another example like the above shot.

This shot has no tilt nor shift. So it’s functioning like a normal 50mm lens. Look pretty good to me.

Optically this lens is good. I do experience a little ghosting at some point/angle of this tilt/shift lens. Generally speaking, this is the character of such lenses. Chromatic aberration is well control. Again in this time and age, CA is something one could easily corrected in post. Not a deal breaker.

Lastly; and most importantly, I had fun using such class of lenses. That is what matters most in our photographic journey.