I have always been interested in tilt/shift lenses. Although they are very expensive, they produce some amazing effects.
One of the advantages for landscape photographers for example is that you can tilt the plane of focus almost horizontally and thus have an infinite amount of depth of field.

Another great effect of a t/s lens is the miniature effect. It allows you to create only a small area in your picture that is in focus and everything around it in an elliptical manner is out of focus. Thus our brain perceives what we see as very small.
Recently I saw a report about a German based photographer, who goes around the world making short movies with a tilt/shift lens. The results are incredible, take a look at it yourself in the below video.

Brent showed me the link to a guy called Joey L. – a very talented environmental portrait photographer.
He travels to very remote corners of the world in order to photograph the native people – a vanishing world.
I find his work very touching – not only are those photos very evocative and beautifully executed portrait shots, many of his images also include incredible backgrounds vistas.
This is environmental photography at its best.

Check out Joe L’s gallery here and below is the official trailer to his DVD: “Faces of a vanishing world” – a one hour look behind the scenes. I can’t wait to see it!