I found an old 28-85mm and a 70-210mm lens my father used on his 35mm Minolta but they are incompatible with my D7000. Keeping in mind I'd rather not take off the current lens to avoid any dust going in:
How could I put them to use? Tilt-shift? Ultra macro?
I currently have an 18-105mm lens and perhaps I could use the 70-210mm directly on the camera via an adapter
Consider getting a lens reversal ring. Screw it on the filter end and then you can mount the lenses on your D7000 in reverse for some macro shots!
No. Do not buy an adapter. Any adapter for Minolta MD lenses to Nikon bodies will either sacrifice the ability to focus to infinity or require a (usually cheap, low quality single) lens element for infinity focus. This is a simple consequence of the Nikon lens mount sitting further away from the body than on the manual Minolta MD system. Short of rebuilding the lens mount for a Nikon, you will be limited in your use of these lenses. These lenses offer nothing special and may even suffer from color fringing when used on a modern digital sensor.
Tilt shift requires the lens cover a larger image circle than the film/sensor. In theory, the crop body has some room to play with full frame lenses, but frankly, you're wasting your time. Consider that this is coming from someone with over 200 lenses and shoots half frame 35mm to 8x10 and only uses two Canon lenses on a 5DII - out of my 30 most used lenses for that camera. I'm hardly opposed to experimentation, but the result here is well understood and not better or cheaper than buying a 75-150/3.5 Series E Nikon lens.
Donation, teaching (or learning) 35mm film, or adaptation to smaller digicams (e.g. NEX, m4/3, etc.) are your best options here.
Adam Lipstadt
Donate them to your local high school. Both my kids took several semesters of photography in high school. Old school film bodies, lenses, enlargers, darkrooms, great stuff...
Whenever my daughter went out shooting with me I'd make her use the Canon nifty-fifty to make her work even harder, the high school kids today are the photographers or tomorrow, help them out!
You should consider buying an adapter that makes it possible to use the Minolta lenses on your Nikon. Many old Minolta lenses are of good quality (I have owned some of them). You will have to set the focus and aperture manually.
Maybe you do not get the best optical quality, but if you are looking for creative ways to use your lens this might be a way.
You could build a DIY tilt shift lens. There are loads of ideas on this page
photo above from creativepro.com
