Just got home from making my first two photos with a LF camera with movements. It was a bit of a comedy. I was trying to follow the focus and check method I read about here on LFPF. I think I have pretty strong spacial sense ( I studied mathematics and physics in college ) but it was easy to lose track of what I was trying to do, especially while attending all the other details of composing and exposing....

I went to a park with oak trees and a large open field where I could move around. My first subject was a tall live oak tree, and it did not take long for me to realize that the upper part of the tree was closer to me than the base. I decided to try to tilt the plane of focus... of course I've been imagining tilting the other direction, and I immediately got confused about whether the near point in the upper branches or the far point at the base was the focus point or the check point. Eventually I picked the near point to focus on and the check to be the base.... and then I wasn't sure if I had to crank the front standard further out if that meant I needed more or less tilt....

All this was being done using base tilt and then re-plumbing the rear standard. At one point I am positive I went through the correct amount of tilt, but then lost track again of which direction of focus check corresponded to more tilt or less . And I lost track of which was the PF and which was the PC, so I made exactly the mistake that the article says newcomers usually make and started focusing on both as I went back and forth.

Finally I realized that when I got the plane of focus close to the plane I was trying to achieve, the very top of the tree against the sky was out of focus and that's a high contrast and noticeable place in the image. In the end I chose an amount of tilt where it seemed like the base, near high branches, and top of the tree were about equally fuzzy and then I stopped down.

I learned a lot. I learned that a small adjustment of tilt makes a pretty big difference, but also that if you are careful you can start to get a sense of what a small movement will do. I can also tell that the movements are not too sensitive to control and that with experience it will work well. I need to develop some better spacial sense of the angles in the camera, so I don't lose track of what the focus checks mean. There were birds flitting around in the trees and I was astonished how well I could see them... on the ground glass the detail is pretty amazing.

In my second photograph, most of the trees were about the same distance away, and I just focused into the middle of them and stopped down a bit.

All in all a fun day and I have a lot to learn!