seenew said:
How's a tilt-shift work? I saw those on Canon's site, but I've not heard much about them.
Shifting is easy to understand. When the lens is mounted on a camera, it's centralised: the framing of the picture centres the image on the sensor. By shifting the lens, you shift the part of the picture that is on the sensor. This allows you to take a full-frame shot of (say) a building, with the camera pointed directly at the object; normally, such a shooting direction would leave you with a lot of ground at the bottom of the picture, and the building in the top half. By shifting, you can get just the building, thereby getting the lines of the building in their "proper" perspective.
It might help if you think of the lens as casting a larger than usual image circle, and you're deliberately choosing the part of the picture to crop, before it even hits the sensor.
As for tilt: I don't know how it works, but I can tell you the effect: you can take a shot of (for example) a railway line, with the rails stretching out into the distance in perfect focus, with everything else above and below the lines being increasingly out of focus.
It'd be cool to learn exactly how the "tilt" part of the tilt-shift lens works, but I suspect the maths would really play merry hell with my brain.
I'd like to get my hands on a TS-E to play around with it, but I doubt I could justify the cost. Trippy lens; the only thing to remember is that they're manual focus only.
