When we were first discussing the series of patent applications on motorized tilt-shift lenses for the RF mount, one of my musings was the ability to use this to automate stitching and various shooting at different shifts and tilts.
It appears in this patent application that Canon had the same idea (if I gave it to y’all, someone owes me – I’ll be in Japan in February – k thanks)
As what could be described as a natural thought evolution of having motor control over the shift and tilting functions of a lens, we have this patent application that provides the functions to control both the shift and tilt and take images at various intervals. This could be useful for tilt bracketing, and also shifting if you are taking the output and stitching it together from multiple images.
This is the UI interface, and as you can see you can adjust the tilt, shift and also, and twist. and take images at each change amount. This image is machine-translated. But I think we can get the general gist from it. These motorized tilt-shift lenses all for motor control of the tilt, shift amounts as well as rotation (turn), all three of those movements can be automated and stepped in intervals, and photos taken in between the intervals.
How good would this be? It would be very very groundbreaking. Game-changing for those that do this sort of stuff. This would be a whole new level to tilt-shift photography that doesn’t exist outside of very expensive pieces of gear. I honestly can’t wrap my mind around all the potential for this. It would be that good especially when you consider these tilt-shift lenses are auto-focusing and the entire design is to be able hand-hold these lenses.
I don’t know if this will ever make it into production, but all I can say is that this would be groundbreakingly crazy good if they did. Here’s hoping, but as with all patent applications, this may or may not end up in a product.
Source: Japan Patent Application 2023-179295
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