[quote=philo]cou[le of questions.
1. Do you own any tilt lens.
2. How often do you use it.
3. Are you glad you have it in your bag.
i don't own one, but it looks like something I may have use for while shooting trees and general landscape work. I don't do a lot of buildings.[/quote]
I have and use three - 24, 45 and 85mm Nikkors. These manual focus lenses have become my go to lenses for many tasks.
1. For easy panoramas, just use the camera in portrait orientation and take three images - left, center and right most position.
2. To avoid tilting the camera up and introducing keystoning, you can shift the lens instead. Keeps things in "perspective" so to speak.
3. To avoid objects in the foreground - if you are shooting next to a tree and the tree is a distraction, you can shift the lens to eliminate that tree at the border.
4. For control over depth of field, like a lens baby, or full-blown view cameras, you can have focus from your toes to infinity without resorting to using F32 and softening the entire image (
scheimpflug principle). While you may tilt the plane of focus towards infinity it becomes a cone in the process. reducing the aperture increases the angle of the cone. If you merely want to get a very narrow focus point, you can tilt the lens in the opposite direction.
5. Because these are basically medium format lenses in 35mm or DSLR mounts, you are using the center of the lens which is considerably sharper and relatively free of CA and other lens aberrations. So you can experience corner to corner sharpness and consistent image quality when not using shift and tilt.
6. At least the Nikkors will focus to 1:2, making them great lenses to shoot flowers, butterflies and other closeup subjects. You can always add an extension tube to get closer. Adding an extension tube to the 24mm lens gives you very short working distance, perhaps an inch or so, but a pretty dramatic effect if you combine the tube with a small aperture.
My early experiences with photography involved using a Sinar P 4x5 with 65, 75 and 90mm Nikon view camera lenses to do architectural interiors. I also had a Horseman 985, a lightweight foldingmedium format (6x9) view camera with swings and tilts on the film plane as well as the front standard. It was my field camera for landscapes and city scapes, along with my wooden tripod.