Ah yes, the paramender. Long a fan of the old twin lens Mamiya cameras, one remembers the paramender with a certain affection. You are truly correct. The raising of the central column alone might not always keep the distance between point of prime focus and the film plane unchanged. The short focus distance perhaps implies no longer on a level horizon.

 

  When in the past, when a camera was tilted (it seemed to be always lens pointed down) an effort to have the tripod head end up in the spot first sought for (the hoped for) composition, such an effort wasn't always as successful as we wished but we were young teenagers short on funds and long on art inspiration. As we will all remember, it was a simpler time of available Kodachrome, (or if times were close funds wise) Anscochrome (before we learned of GAF's incredible color shift). Dreaming of foreign travel and reading at the bottom of Nat. Geo. printed photos, "Kodachrome by" or "Ektachrome by". Now that both are gone, we have only the memories and thousands of slide pages in storage.