Let us say that you have a half body portrait to make and you want to use a Petzval lens. According to your composition the sitter’s face is not at the center of your frame (where you get Petzval’s optics best performance with no more than 15º angle of view for that part – lens fully open) How do you go about it? Just get the best focus you can while keeping your lens’ axis centered in your frame, no movements, or, do you move your lens or camera back in order to have its axis crossing your sitter’s face? Or something else?

Asking because with modern lenses (I may be wrong about that) if the scene has only one point of interest and composition is OK, I just focus that spot and shoot. But with a lens so uncorrected, that is probably not the best strategy. I will do some tests, but would like to know how others face this situation.