CneTel500_04s

'Awful good to see a post from you Jim. 'Not being smart about LF, I'm always puzzled by the focus vignette. Wish there were 1/2 dz more of this wagon - including detail shots. Can you tell that shot of the truck interior had an impact? Its a pleasure seeing your stuff here or on the other site. 'Hope you & yours are very well.

Thanks for the comment. Very much appreciated. With soft focus you're presented with some extra problems to solve. You want to shoot wide open to get the most buzz from the lens, so focus plane is only affected by camera movements. In this case I chose to use rear swing in order to get more of the car in focus, obviously at the expense of the rear of the building. There's no right or wrong I suppose. Would the picture be better if the wall and the car went soft at the front sooner and the rear wall began with some detail? Hard to say. Perhaps a better balance. It seems unbalanced a bit now with fairly good depth on the right 60% and fairly oof on the left 40%. I'd love to hear some other views.

There are probably traditions/norms for soft focus I'm unaware of, so my thought should be well seasoned (have many grains of salt at the ready). I'm blissfully ignorant of what constraints are in play here, and my bias is not really toward soft focus. Some softness in accutance that has strong detail/resolution is what smacked me into appreciating more than just accutance. (your truck interior) Maybe the short version is that less vignetting would be more. 'Love the subject matter & composition & find the vignetting obscures some of what's interesting. Opening the vignette to have all of the wagon & only slightly more of the bldg would give all the due to a great shot of the wagon & have the bldg provide the complimentary context/environment & leaves enough of the softness for mood/tone.
That said, you could probably shoot an open phone book & I'd be stairing for some time at it.

I really like this idea here. The SF look just seems very special here for this particular scene.....Very impressive indeed.