Ben Horne
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It sounds like you have a pretty good feel for shift. I'll add a few things. Often times, this is used for architecture. Let's say you are shooting a 3 story building, and you are standing across the street from it. With a normal lens, you would need to tilt the lens up to capture the entire building. This leads to perspective distortion since the bottom of the building will be much larger than the top of the building. To maintain a proper perspective, you need to keep the camera level. The solution is to shift the building down into view while keeping the camera level. To make best use of this, you should have a level in the hotshoe of your camera. If you simply eyeball it, your camera might not be level, and you can over shift the lens, resulting in a top of the building that is larger than the bottom.
This can also be used while shooting in nature. Let's say you are shooting in a forest, and want to shoot slightly upward but keep the trees perfectly straight up and down. Simply level your camera, then use shift for your proper composition.
Let's take it a step further. Let's say you want to do a panoramic photo. Set the camera up for a horizontal shot, and shift all the way to the left. Take a shot, shift to the middle, take a shot, then shift to the right, and take a shot. They will stitch together very well, creating a simple panoramic setup.
Now, if you turn your camera vertically, you can do the same. Rotate the lens, then shift to the left, and then to the right. You'll create an image that's more of a 4x5 aspect ratio, but with increased resolution.
As for tilt, this is something that is useful for seemingly expanding your DOF. Just as you noted, you are able to angle the plane of focus so you can cover both a foreground and background element. This works best in a shot like this:
http://www.benhorne.com/images/cover4.jpg
Here, I have the foreground tack sharp, and all the way out to the horizon is also tack sharp. This is a prefect example of using a bit of front tilt. I just angled the lens down slightly.
My mantra is to focus for the foreground, tilt for the background, then repeat the steps to fine tune your tilt.
For the next shot, I used swing --- which is the same thing as tilt, but when you rotate the lens so it is now left and right rather than up and down.
http://www.benhorne.com/images/cover3.jpg
As you can see, I have the cliff in focus on the left, then the plane of focus diagonally follows this cliff face all the way out to the background. Be careful not to tilt/swing too far, or you will lose the background.
You might have noticed that this shot of the cliff also has some shift applied. The camera is perched on the edge of the cliff, but the view is downward. I used the extreme of my shift to get as close as I could, but I still couldn't get the exact composition, so I had to angle the camera downward a bit as well.
These examples were shot on an 8x10 view camera, but the exact same principles apply to your great nikon PC-E lenses. In the context of your D3s, you will need to consider getting an LCD loupe and using live view to see the true placement of your plane of focus while tilting. Looking through the viewfinder while working with the 24mm will be difficult to determine the plane of focus. If you use live view, and magnify the image, you will have a much better feel for how accurate you are. This is just like how I would put a loupe against the ground glass of my camera. The loupe simply allows you to view the screen outdoors without worrying about glare. Check out the Hoodman Hoodloupe. They're great for this.
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