An amazingly sharp update to the architectural photographer's staple lens, this 'L' series wide-angle has tilt and shift controls and a new rotational design, aspherical and UD lens elements for chromatic aberration control, and better coatings to reduce ghosting and flare.

For those of you unfamiliar with tilt-shift lenses, the term refers to the ability to move the lens in relation to the sensor - tilt swings the lens in increments away from perpendicular to the sensor, allowing you to change the plane of focus, and shift allows you to move the rear of the lens parallel to the sensor surface, altering perspective and vanishing lines. This is very similar to the capabilities of large-format cameras.

These attributes make this lens great for three things:

1) It is a fantastically sharp lens with great bokeh even when just using it as a standard lens.

2) It can be great for architectural, landscape and product photography - for instance the shift movement can straighten the receding lines of a building's facade and the tilt movement can match the plane of focus to the plane of the facade, ensuring everything is in focus even at a relatively bright f-stop.

3) It's an amazing creative tool - with the same tilt function you can make the plane of focus shallow and independent on the distance an object is from the camera - making a person and something in the background equally sharp while blurring out everything else. You may have seen this used for making a city or bridge look like a miniature model, or some creative composition in portrait or wedding photography.

We've seen a lot of creative and technically excellent photos taken with this lens, and it's a really fun and interesting way to get a new perspective on photography. In our experience it takes a little getting used to, but after that it's hard to put down!

As with all Tilt/Shift lenses, this is a manual focus only lens. No autofocus here, folks.