My dream of getting a tilt-shift adapter to use on my Olympus E-P1/E-PL1 went crashing out of the window when I found out that a Japanese company/shop was coming out with one that costs about US$400. That’s a lot of money for an adapter and I gave up all hopes … until recently … somehow my itchy fingers typed ‘w … w … w … e … b … a … y … c … o … m’. Out of the blue, I was suddenly reminded of the tilt-shift adapter and did a search and found this one from China … a tilt adapter. Well I guess I don’t need the full tilt-shift feature and the tilt should work good enough for me … and it was goodbye to some money (about US$100) and some waiting for the postman to arrive. They shipped it darn fast and I received it in about 2 days (thru Fedex)!
If you are interested to grab one … just take a slow walk down e(vil)Bay and search for ‘Kipon tilt’ and you should be able to find it.
The adapter accepts Nikon mount lenses and since I have two of those (lenses) … I tried using both of them. Unfortunately the Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 lens is too darn heavy and doesn’t seem very suitable for use with the adapter … but the lucky thing is that I have the Nikon 45mm f2.8 ‘pancake’ lens which goes very well with the setup.
I had to travel up to Malaysia during the weekends to celebrate my dad’s birthday … so I brought the E-PL1 along to test out the tilt adapter. Here are some very random test shots I took …
Since many like using tilt-shift lenses to shoot those ‘toy model’ looking photos … I managed 2 snapshots on that morning before I left for Malaysia. I know these ain’t looking any good but ermm … at least the adapter works. 😛
Even my bro’s little girl ended up being my ‘model’ for me to test the setup. Oh … I also ended up having to use this setup to shoot some snapshots during my dad’s birthday cake cutting session. I forgot to bring my AF lens along and had to struggle (real hard) to focus manually! I’ll post a few photos later on.
I started to love the tilt adapter after about 30 minutes of use. It is like using the Lensbaby but of course … lack the ‘magical’ bending feel of the Lensbaby.
I always find manual focusing with the LCD pretty hard (and thus have been using AF lenses on M4/3 so far) and now with this new combo (spelled ‘FUN’) … I’m worried I might have to save up for the pretty expensive Olympus electronic viewfinder. Arghhh! Damn!
I somehow quite like this one (above) and had it cropped into a pano format. Hmm.
Not sure if a wider lens will give better results but since I don’t have anything wider than a 45mm … I’ll just stick to it until someone has a cheap old manual focus wide lens for sale.
Below are the complete set of test shots. I managed to finish only 1 roll on the Spinner 360 and maybe … try send it to the lab tomorrow. It has been a crazy busy weekend with a little bit of tilting and spinning thrown in. 1:35am now and it is time to go to bed.
