Learned something new, I think...

[railman44]

This is part of the description on eBay:

"Adding the ability to tilt a lens out of alignment with the film plane allows a photographer to gain the look of infinite depth of field even when shooting at wide f-stops and allowing faster shutter speeds to be used. This is particularly valuable for landscape photographers. It is also a valuable tool for product photography where close focusing often limits depth of field even when using small apertures. The Hartblei tilt lens offers 6-degrees of tilt which is enough to bring everything a few feet in front of the camera all the way to the horizon into sharp focus. Lens tilt is achieved by rotating clockwise the tilt handle. One full revolution of the handle corresponds to a lens tilt of 1.5° for the TS-PC Super-Rotator lens."

The Nikon Nikkor PC lens tilts up to 11-degrees in any direction. I had never thought of using mine for product (or still life) photography. They have some pics of what they're talking about:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3343&item=7501977240&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW

Gonna have to give this a try...

 

[ksmattfish]

Theodore Scheimpflug's rule...

http://www.columbia.edu/~akj19/scheimpflug.html#scheimpflug rule

Very handy for landscape photography out here on the plains.

Technically you could do it with a Lens Baby, although the lens in the Lens Baby may be too wacky around the edges to really see the effect.

 

[DocFrankenstein]

Don't go there... You'll get drawn into large format:
http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19114

They didn't warn me about this, when I bought my camera.

 

[Christie Photo]

Well, a practical way to think about this is that you won't gain any DoF, but you can redefine on what plane you are focusing. This would be helpful for table-top shots. But if the shot has some taller obects (especially differing heithts), you'll have a whole new set of problems. I do suspect a useful advantage of this lens is the shift ability. Think about shooting a tall building without having to tip up the camera... no problem with parallax.

What troubles me the most about this particular lens is the price. I suspect there's little quality here. It's priced about the same as a conventional quality lens. Something has to suffer to keep the price low. Probabely optics.

 

[thebeginning]

what does a tilt do? I've always wondered that...

 

[Hertz van Rental]

what does a tilt do? I've always wondered that...

The same as swing but in the vertical plane instead of the horizontal.
If you have two objects - one near, one distant - that you want in focus but depth of field won't do it then you use swing and tilt.
You draw an imaginary line through the two objects to find the plane of common focus. Then you draw an imaginary line through the plane of the camera back.
Find where the two lines cross and swing/tilt the lens so an imaginary line through it meets at the same point.
The camera's plane of focus is now the same as that of the two objects (instead of parallel to the camera) and both objects are in focus.
You can tilt/swing the back as well.
It's called the Scheimpflug Principle.