Grisled professionals who stumble upon this will balk at my newbie experience with perspective control lenses, but those who have never even seen one, let alone looked through the viewfinder while operating one, will find this interesting, I hope.

Perhaps one of the most appealing things about working for a university instead of a student newspaper is that there is a bit more money flowing into things such as equipment, among other things. So I was looking through the cabinet earlier today and noticed the fabled 28mm 1:4 PC-Nikkor. It had been mentioned a few times as being "broken" because the dial that controls the offset wouldn't hold the lens in place. I experienced this problem too, where after shifting the lens, it would slowly side out of place due to gravity. But as long as you hold the lens in place, it still works very well. Perhaps the only hard thing about using this lens is focusing it.

So I took a few shots to show how pretty neat this is. Basically, a perspective control lens is most useful when taking pictures of buildings or similarly large objects whose lines converge as the object moves away from you. You shift the lens using the dial and it will put the lines back parallel to each other by putting the object you are photographing back into the same plane, that is parallel, as the lens and sensor.

For example, here is Burruss Hall shot with a 14mm lens standing about 25 feet from the doors.


Burruss gets smaller as it gets farther away from me. Its lines converge. Now I shot it with a 28mm lens standing about 50 feet away. I did this because the PC lens I am using is a 28mm lens, so you can compare the two focal lengths.


And finally, I stood down by the street, which is about 100 feet away, and shot this with the PC lens. Please not that while Burruss still gets smaller towards the top in this photo, Burruss actually does get smaller as it goes towards the top. But you still see the effect.


And yes, all of these were shot on the same day. In between shooting the second and third photo, a bunch of storm clouds rolled in. Whatever!