Applying movements

[steve simmons]

You could use a little bit of tilt here since the fence posts do not go to the top of the scene. If they did you could not use any tilt. Now, If you tilt with the front you will only rotate the plane of focus but not cause any change in the perspective. If you tilt with the back of the camera you will also rotate the plane of focus but also change the projection distances from the center of the lens to the different areas of the film. This will alter the shape of the various objects in the scene. I am not going to call this distortion as some people do because this word is laden with subjective value. Whether or not this change in the shapes and sizes of the different parts of the scene is good or bad is a personal decision.

I would not use any swing here because swing one way will make the other side of the image more difficult to bring into the dof area and a swing the other way will do the reverse.

Once you have done a little bit of tilt I would place my plane of focus such that the farthest point I care about and the closest are equally soft on the gg. I would then stop down until the dof area expanded to bring both into acceptable sharpness at the same time. This may mean a lot of stopping down but such is life.

just my 2 cents

steve simmons

[John Curran]

There is indeed a technique for getting two different (perpendicular) planes of focus sharp at the same time with the lense wide open!

By placing the camera such that is angled down at a scene and tilting the back rearward, (parallel to the vertical object) one can render both the walkway leading up to a building as well as the face of the building sharp with the lens wide open.

This technique was explained in "View Camera Technique" by Leslie Stroebel. (Focal Press). Furthermore I was able to replicate the technique with a press camera (Graphlex).

The technique can also be applied in the vertical e.g. getting both an opposing wall and an adjacent wall perpendicular and leading up to the opposing wall, sharp.

Mind you DOF near the camera is extremely shallow. While the walkway in my above example would appear sharp, a soda can placed on the walkway near the camera, would only be sharp near the bottom of the can. Further from the camera vertical DOF is greater allowing the face of the building to be sharp.

The technique might not work so well on the image included by Anupam Basu because the elevation in that shot is rising, but would work better if the terrain were more level. Also as in the soda can example, it would be impossible to get the near fence posts sharp in the vertical.

best regards,

john

[john borrelli]

Hello Anupam, Not sure if you are still interested in responses as this is an older thread, but I thought I'd give it a try. The answer to your question is...Pick the tripod up and move it to the right. Move the camera until the fence would begin at the far left side in your photo, Then follow Ansel Adams' directions in his book The Camera for his photo "Rail fence, Thistle and Teton Range, Wyoming". He describes the process better than I could.