Tilt-shifts may be the trickiest and most complicated lenses to master. But the perspective-altering effects they let you achieve are also super rewarding.

If you’ve ever seen one of these crazy images where big things like trucks and planes look like toys, you’ve probably wondered, “How’d they do that?!” Most likely, it was through a tilt-shift. These lenses can copy the way your eyes see something small from up close, for dazzling effects.

As straight lines get further from you, they appear to come together, as if they were trying to converge on some distant point. The shift feature of a tilt-shift lens helps you remove that effect from your images. It’s a handy little trick that helps make buildings look straighter.

Tilt-shift lenses may be hard to use, but they can unlock the door to some amazing techniques. You can combine multiple images into panoramas without moving the camera. Or use selective focus to tell a viewer where to look. Pretty much any way you use it, a tilt-shift lets you truly experience the power of a lens.