We have posted before about tilt-shift lenses. Meant for architectural work, the basic gist is that you can, well, tilt and/or shift the lens as it’s mounted to your camera. The goal is to correct angles, so your shot of a building from the front doesn’t have the lines on the sides looking like they’ll converge. A neat side-effect is that you can use this to leave only a ‘slit’ of the image in focus, which has a really neat effect making the shot almost look like it’s a scale model. (Since tilt-shift lenses cost around $1,000, most photographers fake the effect in Photoshop… Though the linked one did not.)

Of course, in addition to neat “this looks like a scale model!” effects, very selective focus is useful for drawing one’s attention to something.

This [warning: has music] is possibly the most awesome thing ever. It appears to be thousands of shots from a camera with a tilt-shift lens stitched together into a (time-lapse) video. And I don’t really know where to start, other than to say that this is awesome. And that it’s totally not helping my resolve to not buy a high-end DSLR that can do HD video or a lens with a four-digit pricetag.