Imagining A Native Tilt/Shift Adapter

It's no secret that Fotodiox is well-known for our amount of adapter offerings. Whether it's the basic adapters without bells and whistles to our most robust and advanced Fusion or Pronto adapters, we have adapters for all sorts of creators. In the past few years, we've been pushing the envelope and bringing as many specialty adapters to the market to bring consumers effects like macro functionality or tilt/shift movements.

Our TLT ROKR tilt/shift adapters have slowly becomes one of our most popular lines of specialty adapters recently. I've seen tilt/shift effects in TV shows and our TLT ROKR adapters seem to pique the interest of new customers when we're out at tradeshows. From the years of offering the adapters, there's been one question we can't seem to escape:

Do you have a tilt/shift adapter for my native lens?

The easy answer is no, unfortunately. Putting even 1mm of space between a native lens and its camera is already too much space and removes the lens' ability to focus to infinity. That being said, the components in our TLT ROKR adapters take up a fixed amount of space (I'd estimate somewhere between 26 to 30mm), so you'd basically be working with an extension tube of that length.

Still, some customers are rather adamant that it could be fine for them, and depending on the type of work they do, I'd say it's absolutely possible. This will be the case especially if one only does macro work.

While we don't manufacture any TLT ROKR adapters going from one mount of lens to the same mount's camera, we can actually simulate it. Over the years, I've noticed that Sony E lenses do physically fit into a Nikon F bayonet (it locks too!). It should be noted we don't recommend this for use at all and that any tests for this are done in a controlled environment.

That being said, here's a picture of the full set-up.

Like I said earlier, the lens does lock on, but with the difference in lock pin position on the two different mounts, the Sony E-mount lens is mounted off-kilter. Thankfully, our TLT ROKR adapter has a rotate option, so we're able to turn the lens until the aperture is about at the top.

The lens we used is the Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS zoom, but right off the bat, there were some problems. While the zoom works as intended, the aperture does not (which I fully anticipated), but neither did the focus. Since the lens doesn't have its own aperture ring, aperture control would be electronic, but it turned out that the lens needed electronic connection even for manual focus. Despite this, I was able to get focus, but the working distance depended on what the lens' focal length was set to.

Lens set to 28mm

Lens set to 70mm

This setup works infinitely better with a third-party, fully-manual E-mount lens since it'll give us the most control. I looked through our lens cabinet and found two lenses that might work: the Viltrox PFU RBMH 20mm f/1.8 ASPH and Lensbaby Velvet 85mm. From my testing, the Viltrox 20mm lens wouldn't let me get close enough to focus at all, but the Lensbaby Velvet 85 did end up working. The Velvet gave me similar results to the 28-70mm set to 70mm, but just like with the zoom, I was basically locked into a macro range.

While we don't have any plans to release dedicated tilt/shift (or any other niche) adapters for pairing native lenses and cameras, this little experiement is a great view into what to expect even if an adapter like that did exist.