Note: This article is intended for camera enthusiasts and professionals. I will assume that the reader is familiar with all the fun vernacular.

Commercially photographing architecture with a camera system that was never intended for that purpose left me in an unusual position. For years I corrected Fujifilm X-System images in software, which was a totally acceptable solution for moderate correction of verticals. Unfortunately, this approach somewhat falls apart at extreme angles where it incurs an unacceptable loss in resolution. It was also very hard to pre-visualise what the results would look like in post-production. When shooting these extremer compositions in the field, I could never be quite sure if the image would be a keeper or not.

Over the last few years I spent a lot of time researching options to achieve true shift capability on the Fujifilm X-System. One popular option with the enthusiast crowd seem to be mechanical shift adapters by companies like Kipon. Manual focus/aperture lenses with an image circle larger than APS-C are required to make this work on an APS-C sensor. Many people happily seem to use old full-frame lenses for that purpose. The problem is that those lenses tend to be not quite wide enough for architectural application. The most popular focal length for shifted architectural photography is rather wide-angle at around 24mm on full-frame (16mm equivalent FOV on a Fuji APS-C sensor). I have never been able to identify suitable lenses that combine the right properties of focal length, image quality and availability to make this work on X-System bodies.

Note: I will be referring to all focal lengths in 35mm full-frame equivalent terms as a common denominator. You can find a (hopefully accurate) conversion chart at the end of this article.

Along the way some people suggested to look into technical view cameras, but with the amount of lens changes and sheer running around that I have to do in a day, the awkwardly sized contraptions would have been hugely impractical to work with. So why not simply adapt the king of architecture, Canon’s 24mm TS-E II? While that would have been an option due to the recently released avalanche of FX to EF adapters, it would also have introduced its own set of problems. The 1.5x crop factor pushed an ‘ideal’ 24mm full-frame focal length to something in the 36mm range. Canon’s 17mm TS-E lens would have been a better fit, working out to around 25mm on Fujifilm X. The problem is that I work a lot with polarising filters, and Canon’s 17mm TS-E requires special adapters and enormous 150mm filters. Once again, this wasn’t compatible with my workflow. And then there was also the issue with aperture control.

With the latest generation of smart lens adapters the electronic aperture issue is a thing of the past. But when I originally started to look for a solution in 2016, only manual adapters were available. While Canon’s TS-E lenses come with a manual focus ring, aperture control is electronic. That means the aperture remains set to whatever it was last set to while connected to a Canon body. I shoot most of my work in the f8 to f11 range, but there are a few exceptions, for example at night. Lugging a spare Canon body around just to change aperture would have been awkward to say the least. Again, with the latest Fringer and Steelsring adapters that problem is now resolved (more on other issues with some of these adapters later).

At some point Samyang equipped their existing 24mm TS-E lens for full-frame cameras with an X-mount, but reviews of the lens were mediocre at best. It also came with the same crop factor penalty that pushed the lens too far out of the wide-angle realm.

With no viable alternative available, I kept correcting in software. When the angle was too extreme, I sometimes used a panorama bracket. While this worked well, it was too time consuming for regular application.