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.
very nice set.
I’m sure the MF does give you some practice, but sure was hell hard for fuzzyeyeballs eh?? 😛
wow….I love the shot of the potted plant.
welcome back! how was malaysia? this kipon tilt doesnt come with m43 to m43, because i have adapters for all m43… lol
@Mijonju : Thanks. Well the trip there was as tiring as ever … as expected. Hahaha. The adapter only accepts Nikon lenses and one more takes Leica R ones. I’m sure you have some Nikon lenses around. Right? eBay welcomes you with open arms. 😛
@nelly : Thanks. Yeah … old and tired fuzzyeyeballs are gonna drop and roll soon.
@Jer : Thanks!
I think im just gonna climb up the free diving platform and relax my face towards the water and dive into the Evil bay.
@Mijonju : Why are we not surprised at all? LOL! 😛 😛 Happy diving!
Hi Andrew, Nice tilt effect images. May I know have you try Lensbaby Tilt Transformer? How well Kipon fair against the Lensbaby interms of maximum degree of tilt?
I’m still considering between these two and I’m glad I found your blog. I heard my friend who tried the Kipon says the kipon tilt degree is very much lesser than the actual tilt shift lens.
Hope to get your reply. Thanks.
@Choon Wee : I’ve yet to receive my copy of the Tilt Transformer and thus unable to give you an exact answer. However I guess the Tilt Transformer might work better than the Kipon one since they claim that ‘Lensbaby’s Tilt Transformer allows photographers to mount any Nikon® mount lens to the Tilt Transformer’s swivel ball and fluidly tilt up to twice as far as standard tilt-shift lenses.’. I’ll definitely do a simple review of the Tilt Transformer when it arrives … hopefully this month. 😀
Thanks for your reply. I just order a Kipon tilt for my NEX.
Hope you can get your hand on the Tilt Transformer & do a simple review against Kipon tilt adapter soon.
@Choon Wee : Congrats on the new purchase. Meanwhile I’ll wait patiently for Lensbaby to send me the Tilt Adapter but not sure when. I was hoping it will arrive before my vacation next week but it looks like it will not make it on time. 🙁
Thanks for posting this, just what I was looking for. Your test shots are beautiful, too – as soon as I saw the B&W shot of the plants on the ground, I was S-O-L-D! 🙂
@Kim : My pleasure. 🙂 Hope you enjoy the ‘toy’ too.
Hi Ndroo,
Can I ask if you think this is useful for product shots like in large format ?
Thanks in advance.
Casey
@casey : Sorry I have not touched large format photography before but I don’t think this adapter is available for LF cameras. I might be wrong though.
Hi ndroo,
What i mean is is this good enuff for product shoots on my dslr to emulate large format product shoots ?
Thanks in advance.
Casey
@casey : Oh … so that’s what you meant. This adapter is for the M4/3 mount. Not sure about DSLRs. I’ve tried using some other tilt adapter (ages ago) with some medium format lens. Results were pretty satisfying (for my fuzzy standard). 😀 However … I think nothing beats a real tilt-shift lens.
thanks for the feedback.
i think they do have similar for 43 mounts.
Best superior USA proxies – https://DreamProxies.com sequence utilizing 50 cut price!
In this great pattern of things you receive a B+ for effort and hard work. Where you confused everybody was first in the particulars. As as the maxim goes, details make or break the argument.. And it couldn’t be much more accurate here. Having said that, let me inform you what exactly did deliver the results. Your authoring can be incredibly convincing and this is probably the reason why I am making an effort to comment. I do not make it a regular habit of doing that. Secondly, whilst I can notice a jumps in reason you come up with, I am not sure of exactly how you appear to connect your points which in turn produce the actual final result. For now I shall subscribe to your point but trust in the future you link your dots better.
Would you be desirous about exchanging hyperlinks?
There’s definately a lot to know about this issue. I love all the points you made.
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You obviously know what youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your blog when you could be giving us something informative to read?
some truly fantastic info , Sword lily I found this.
Keep on writing, great job!
I was extremely pleased to uncover this site. I want to to thank you
for your time for this particularly wonderful read!! I definitely appreciated every bit of it and i
also have you book-marked to look at new information on your blog.