Tilt photography
End result (click for high res)
Besides the cliched “miniature effect” you get bombarded with when you look up tilt shift photography, there are a lot of other cool effects you can get with a tilt shift lense.
One of my favorites is just simply tilting the focus plane. You have to imagine that normally the plane of focus is parralel to the image sensor in the camera, so you could visualize a thin wall in front of the camera that you can move back and forth, and that wall is where the focus lies. Now with a tilt shift lense you can tilt and shift that wall so that you can not only change its position forward and backward but also rotate it and litterally tilt and shift it.
What I tried to do here is make it appear that the focus plane is not running from side to side but from the front left corner to the back a bit more on the right side. I managed this by taking 6 photos, each time moving the focus plane backward by a bit.
Then I went into photoshop and erased parts out of the photos to reveal certain areas in focus and others out of focus, thus getting the wanted effect of the tilted focus plane.
Here are some real tilt shift photos, not photoshopped, and not done by me:
