I have been checking lens sharpness for years and this test has yet to fail. Com pose a page of grided lines, varing the lines in thickness from extremly thin to thick rectangles (11 x 17 co mputer printout works great.) Set the grid page up parallel to the film back, focus only on the grided page an d at a distance that is what you normally would have in the fore ground. Then burn some film. Run the full range of f-stops, one f-stop for each piece of film. Use post-it notes with the f-stop printed in large marker so you don't get lost on which is which. With a 10x to 20x lope you will know what stops are sharp and what are not by lo oking at the thinner lines or the line edges where black meets white. If you only enlarge prints to 3x to 4x a 5x to 10x lope will work. So on and so on. Keep things simple; set up tests that relate to actual field use, lab use and final print size. It works. I photograph with an 8 x 10, there are many occassions when I plan on contact pr inting and absolute sharpness is not a factor (useful when extreme depth of field problems occur.) f -90 contacts well most of the time and enlarges like . . . . For enlargements, my 355mm G Claron doesn't ev en get sharp on infinity until f-32 where my 210XL goes to krap at anything past f-32.

As for having the foreground and background in focus with the mid-ground less sh arp you are probably using too much tilt. Try finding the spot where the fore/back ground are in approximat e focus as compared to the mid-ground focus and stop down to acheive sharp focus throughout. If you have to stop down to f90 to get both fore/back and mid ground in focus you probably have too much foreground in the frame or the tilt is off.