Using tilt-shift Nikkor lenses on Nikon Z cameras for architecture photography is by Dominique Robert (additional photos can be found here):
Architecture photography is, first and foremost, about walls. Walls are vertical and straight or essentially straight when one thinks about very old churches and other such buildings. Experienced photographers will want to keep them that way, lest they end up, like most amateurs, with buildings that look like they are toppling over backward. This is caused by converging verticals, i.e., vertical lines that should be straight and parallel but are not, because the camera has been angled upwards (or downwards, more rarely, in which case the verticals diverge instead of converging).
Usually, the reason why this happens is because the photographer needed to fit it all within the limits of the frame: when standing at street level in front of a church, a castle or a modern tall tower, most of the time one will be too close to include the top of the edifice in the frame, even with a wide-angle lens. To fit it all in, one will be tempted to tilt the camera up. The moment they do this, the plane on which the image is being recorded (the camera sensor) ceases to be vertical and parallel to the walls of the building being photographed; this lack of parallelism creates the converging verticals.
Converging verticals can, to some extent, be corrected in post-production, but this process alters the composition and hurts the image quality, as some pixels are destroyed and others are ìinventedî by software. Demanding photographers will therefore attempt to do it right in-camera, which can sometimes be achieved by moving back until the whole building fits in the frame, even if that means cropping in later to get rid of the unwanted surroundings. When moving back is not an option because there isnít enough space to do so that’s when tilt-shift lenses step in.
