Hi,
I got myself a Sony A7rII a few months ago. One of the reasons I went for it was that I wanted to do tilt and shift photography. This posting is about tilts.
It is possible to get a tilted plane of focus by tilting the sensor relative to the lens. There is a rule named after a captain Scheimpflug in the Astro-Hungarian Army in WW I that says that if the subject plane, lens plane and sensor plane cut each other all of that subject plane will be in focus. To achieve that, you need to be able to tilt either the focal plane or the lens.
When I am shooting this kind of images I try to focus at the center and use peaking to find approximate tilt. After that I switch to magnified LV and adjust focus for center, modify tilt to get background object in focus and do a new careful focus on the main object. This is best down at full aperture and stopping down just for exposure.
This picture was shot a few days ago:
As you can see, most of the image is in good focus, but if you look at the first attached image you can also see that the plane of focus is rather thin. The strains of grass behind the small pine are clearly out of focus. The trees in the background are also in focus.
This image was actually a reshot of an older one, where I have put the background focus on the small rocks in the background, causing the trees being out of focus. Placement of that tilting plane needs to be well chosen.
This image was shot using a Contax 35-135/3.3-4.5 zoom that I bought on EBay. The reason I bought that lens was mostly that I needed a manual aperture as the T&S adapter I use doesn't allow for aperture control.
The image needed some fix up in Lightroom, I used three applications of the graduated filter and three of the radial filter. The original image is shown below.
The original DNG file is here:
http://echophoto.dnsalias.net/ekr/Articles/Shoots/TS_Stuff/The image below shows the HCam Master TSII with a Canon 16-354/L:
And the lens below is the Hasselblad Distagon 60/3.5 CF:
Best regards
Erik