Using a Fotodiox shift adapter

To anybody who might consider buying one of these "pro" adapters :

Please be aware that they do not allow for focusing to infinity !!!

Communicated with (great) difficulty about this to Fotodiox, but they could not give a satisfactory solution. They just sent a replacement item, that was no better than the original one  

Also, as Ad states, the tripod fixation is not really useful. It is not solid enough and the fixation surface is too small. I wanted to use it with my Nikkor 180/2.8 ED, but it is of little help  

Fazit : definitely not the product that I would advice you to buy !

Have a nice sunday,
Rafael

 

I have had a bad experience with a Fotodiox adapter, the machining on mine is just plain sloppy...
A Leica R to EOS adapter I have skips its locking pin when one changes the aperture on the lens causing the lens and body to part company!!! I am sure there are other good manufacture's out there but the only one I have absolutely no fault with is Novoflex.
With regards to tilt and shift, the Lensbaby is very well made perhaps a bit lightly built I would imagine that their current offering would serve quite well with a Nikkor lens attached. It may not be as precise as a Canon or Nikon T&S but from experience it would not have any slack in it or fall off the camera.

 

Which lenses do you use, Ad ?
I was told by Fotodiox (in the end) that infinity was missed with lenses opening wider than f2.8 which is about my whole lens collection.
And, my personal tests showed that even lenses opening at f4.5 did miss infinity, although to a lesser extend.

C U,
Rafael

 

Mine is for an OM mount, I found it to be .3mm SHORT and would not focus to infinity, so I had to take off the flange (the one on the lens side of the adapter) and add the shim. It will now focus to infinity without a problem.

 

Just to clarify, I could focus beyond infinity. In other words, when I focused on an object lets say at 300 meters, the lens scale indicated a distance less than infinity. Hope I didn't confuse anyone.

 

I'll jump into this thread half a year later to report that Jeff Holland of Fotofiax informed me today, in answer to my query regarding the reported inability for some lenses to focus at infinity with this mount, that "We are aware of the problem and our next batch of the shift adapters is going to be made slightly thinner to allow for full infinity."

 

Just a note, if the lens is focussed at infinity and the scale says something like 30m or 10m, it isn't an issue. The real problem is when you cannot get sharp focus for objects at long disances at any position on the focus scale. That is a difficult situation to solve as you would have to remove metal to get proper focus.

 

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the purpose of this? I can see the slight difference in the photos, but............... shift without the tilt or something?  

 

I'm late to this party but have learned so much from reading about these adapter I wanted to say thinks for the posts.

Here's my 2¢ worth. A shift adapter would have some stiching/panorama uses in a couple ways. I own old film Widelux & an Xpan & having a shift lens I could use on my OM-D would be a good substitute.

Full frame 20mm & 40mm w/ the camera in portrait orientation & shifting horizontally could yield 105 & 54 deg. horizontal FOV (if I did the math right) with 3-4 stitched frames. Not bad. The advantage of this approach over rotating around the nodal point is fewer restrictions about keeping the camera level to prevent having a curved horizon.

Alternatively you could use the shift to raise or lower the lens vertically w/ nodal rotation horizontally to get a larger FOV.

Now if Fotodiox will just improve the tolerances & make the shift adapter for Pentax lens I'd be set. Pentax has several small legacy wides (which I own) + the current 15mm Limited that would be terrific for this kind of setup.