18th January 2007, Canon TS-E 90/2.8:
Introduction: TS-E 90 is a special lens to photograph products, still life, flowers, details of buildings etc. 90mm focal length is ideal to maintain accurate perspective without distortions, and same time allowing normal shooting distances for various size of subjects. Lens movements allow altered focus area by tilting and simultaneous altered perspective by shifting the lens. Typically tilt is used to obtain more or less area in focus than what can be achieved by setting aperture with normal lens. Shift is used to adjust perspective, to control reflections on small subject, for stitching a panorama and so on.

I'm using TS-E 90 for product and still life studio photography, flowers, plants and fungi. Propably also some occasional use for portraits and landscapes. With 5D this lens will be successor for my EF 50/2.5 Macro on 30D. Perspective on full frame will be quite the same, but yes, little narrower field of view. However the increased resolution combined with lens movements is a godsend for most applications I'm going to use this lens! I'm using this lens almost always on tripod. Also Angle Finder C is useful gadget for precise focusing and uncomfortable camera positions (ground level, camera touching studio softbox..)

Body and Operations: Lens weighing 565g feels like a solid piece of metal. Like with other Canon T&S lenses, focusing is manual only. Focusing ring is robust and big enough with some distance scale information. Lens is extending while focusing closer but the lens front is not rotating. Lens hood supplied with the lens is a useful clip-on type model, fully adequate for its job.

Tilt and shift are controlled with metal knobs. On the opposite side of both of them there are smaller knobs to adjust the tightness of main knobs. For my use I leave them quite loose and forget there, main knob settings are not changing too easily by themselves. Third control for tilt and shift operation is rotation lever, which is a small clip on rear side of lens. Rotation is working +-90 degrees from base point with 30 degrees 'stop points'. Clearly speaking this means that you can tilt or shift at any direction, not only up/down or left/right directions. Well, as long as the tilting and shifting directions are + OR -90 degrees into each other... more of that later.

Magnification ratio 0.293 (0,5m/1.6ft) is not exactly in macro region, but with 12mm extension tube and 1.4x teleconverter (combination is working, but not recommended by Canon) I can get 0.61 magnification. With 1.4x TC only the magnification ratio is 0.41. So far I have been trying with TC only.

Optical quality: As with EF 50/2.5 Macro: sharpness, flare resistance and color reproduction are painstakingly excellent, propably more than I can resolve with 13mpix full frame. Let's talk about that subject again when we will have next generation +20mpix FF cameras to peep the pixel. Seriously, I wonder the magnitude of problem people are having with optical quality of modern 35-135mm prime lenses: I have a hundred times more serious issues with my photographing skills compared to issues I have with my $65 EF 50/1.8 optical quality..

Lens Movements: You can tilt at any direction +-8 degrees and shift at any direction +-11 mm, but the direction of tilt must be perpendicular (not parallel) with shift direction. If you prefer tilt and shift on same (parallel) direction, you have to bring your lens to Canon service center or do the adjustment by yourself (at your own risk). The operation includes removing four miniscule screws from body, turning lens front counter-clockwise 90 degrees, then attaching the screws again. If you are asking me: this operation should be another knob control in lens rather than risky exercise requiring special tools like it is now!

If you want fully free lens movements, there are some non EOS-mount 'super-rotator' models to be used via adapter, but I have no experience on them. Larger format cameras have typically much more control for movements but in DSLR world the offerings are very limited. On left picture you can see TS-E 90 tilted up full 8 degrees, on right one lens is shifted left full 11 millimeters.

Here I'm going more in detail with the movements, the setup is boring but informative for the sake of demonstrating the lens movements.

Tilt Down: Left side you can see how little the actual depth of field is, even with f16, nudging the diffraction limit on full frame. Dof only a few centimeters and the background Pomegranate is clearly out of focus. On the right side I have tilted lens down full 8 degrees, refocused, and now both fruits are in focus. With normal lens we should possibly stop deep down into diffraction zone: f32, and even then we would have not everything in focus. This is quite ideal composition for maximum depth of field, subjects are not very tall and the perspective is downwards into subject. There are also situations where you can get the greatest possible subject area in focus just by leaving lens untilted! Note that just like shifting, tilting is changing also framing of picture. Along with with tilting, you have to move camera slightly to maintain the same framing.
Tilt Up: In this setup tilting up full 8 degrees is reducing in focus area quite radically. Combined with full f2.8 aperture you can abstract background into soft bokeh and leave only the front part of the main subject sharp. If you are looking magazines nowadays, some food photographers seem to be going over the board with this and you can hardly recognize what the portion actually consists ;)

Other option is to take it easy and make more subtle adjustment with f5.6, as shown on right hand picture. Anyway you choose, tilting will offer you a much wider range of focusing options than you would ever get with normal lens.

Shift: With wide angle t&s lens shift is generally more useful than tilt, but there are situations where you like to have shift at 90mm too. You can stich very large panoramas by using horizontal or vertical shift. With shifted telephoto the edges are much easier stitch at post processing than with normal lenses or wide angles. Another trick would be to avoid reflection of camera and photographer on subject: with horizontal shift you can shoot even mirror that way.

In product photography there may be very strict tolerances for correct perspective, a slight shift to correct lines can save loads of time at postprocessing. Then there are situations where your possibility to move camera is very limited like shooting flower or fungi at ground level, any possibility to alter framing without moving tripod can sort out a keeper picture from throw-away. This example is not very useful for any of the abovementioned but merely shows how much you can horizonally shift from the base composition:

A few examples. Still life: Picture on the right would not be possible with normal lens and without several pictures morphed in post processing. Two other pictures have various degrees of more subtle tilt and shift adjustments.
Outdoors: Two picture on the left illustrates 'doll house' effect which you can get by tilting away from focus plane to get only small strip of picture in focus. In middle picture I used 1.4 teleconverter to get the effect for a far away subject. Teleconverter 'magnifies' the effect of lens movements quite a bit. I'm yet to try extension tubes.. The picture on the right demonstrates simple stitching of three exposures: full left, normal and full right horizontal shifts. Quick and dirty example, but with more thought and time put into process, you can get huge files for panoramas!
Conclusion: My initial findings of TS-E 90/2.8 has been very positive, but there is still a mountain to climb to learn all the lens movement possibilities. In midst of Winter I couldn't cover my most important application for TS-E 90: flowers and fungi. But I hope you got some new ideas of this weird lens here. Happy shooting!