TTArtisan 17mm f4 Tilt Shift Review: The Toughest Lens I’ve Used

I’m currently writing this review the weekend after the 4th of July here in America — and I’m ultimately struggling to write this review. Why? It’s not at all because of festivities; in fact, I’ve pretty much gone full straight edge. Instead, it’s for the same reason that it took me so long to write this review in the first place. I got this lens in May and I’m writing the review in June. And it’s ultimately because the TTArtisan 17mm f4 Tilt Shift lens is one of the most complex and annoying tilt-shift lenses that I’ve ever used. Perhaps this is justified as it’s also by far the most affordable. The company made a great lens and then took away some of the best parts of the tactile pleasures of a tilt-shift lens.

For this reason, I’m not writing this review in our traditional way. In fact, there’s no need to. It’s not like it’s going to get firmware updates anytime soon as it’s a purely mechanical piece of equipment with no electronics whatsoever.

The TTArtisan 17mm f4 Tilt Shift is a big lens. Make no mistakes at all about that. It’s also pretty heavy and made entirely of metal. These are some of the things that make it so incredibly appealing. But then when you get to actually working with the lens, I couldn’t help but letting out big, heavy sighs.

All the knobs that are designed to usually move the lens’s tilting and shifting mechanisms are essentially moot. All they do is lock and unlock the sections. Then you have to physically shift the lens to where you want it and lock it back in place. Then, once you lock it, you have to hope that it stays in place — luckily, most of the time it does.

The only parts that really do feel nice are the rotation mechanism near the mount of the lens and the aperture ring. This is what you’re paying for though: a super affordable tilt-shift lens. It’s nowhere as expensive as the options from Canon, Fujifilm, etc.

As with all tilt shift lenses, you should really use this with a tripod. This is part of what I absolutely adore about this lens — it forces me to slow down and to make something where I shoot far fewer images than I normally do. It’s not like I shoot a ton to begin with. If someone were to make 120 frames, I’d probably end up shooting like 36 or so — the equivalent of a roll of film.

I shot these images using the TTArtisan 17mm f4 Tilt Shift on the Canon EOS R5 and the Promaster Epoch, which is seriously still my favorite tripod. I’m sure that I get to keep the TTArtisan 17mm f4 Tilt Shift lens; and the brand knows that that won’t affect my review’s statements.

Adjusting the scenes in front of me were quite a lot of work. I often had to remember that both my tripod head and my lens were parts of what allowed me to have better peripheral corrections. So I’d have to adjust one or the other at times. Ultimately though, I ended up making images that couldn’t be majorly corrected in Capture One. A lens like this really lets me take my own advice and majorly focus on making images in-camera.

The above photograph is an image that I thought was maybe a bit off. And indeed even now, I still think so. But it’s not all that terribly off and I’d still think that it’s perfectly acceptable in the eyes of most unless you’re being super, duper critical.

Here are other images.

The TTArtisan 17mm f4 Tilt Shift lens is a good lens if you’re looking for something very affordable. But it lacks the more refined and exacting controls of higher end tilt-shift lenses. The tradeoff: the insanely affordable price point of around $500.

Personally speaking, I wouldn’t buy this lens. But I’m surely going to have a lot of fun with it; and if you mounted it to an APS-C camera, you may even get more out of it. Ultimately, what I’m saying is that I’d rather pay more money for a more premium lens instead.