Tilt-Shift Shenanigans

The Teen wanted Joshua Tree.  Which is a pretty funky place.  And I wanted to add to the funky.  So I rented a 17mm tilt-shift lens for the occasion.  This lens is fascinating.  To state the obvious, it has both a tilt function and a shift function – both of which give the photographer multiple choices as to which items/planes to have in focus).  Additionally, each of those functions can be separately rotated 180*.  To say that this is a sophisticated, complicated piece of machinery that I couldn’t possibly exhaustively learn in 48 hours is an understatement.  But even as clueless as I was to its numerous possibilities and abilities, I surely had fun with it…
One of the trickiest elements of this lens – for me, anyway – was the manual focusing.  Because, truth to tell, I’m quite nearsighted and desperately dependent on my camera’s autofocus function.  Since this lens was 17mm, it was “pushing” items even further from me than the naked eye naturally registers.  Thus, I had no clue that in the picture below, Big Dude’s right hand is perfectly in focus, while his left hand was already falling out of focus. Or, in this picture, I couldn’t remotely tell that The Teen was completely OUT of focus.  But I’m going to embrace my “mistake” and call it art.  Who says the focus needs to be spot on him?!? One of the neat possibilities with tilt-shift is that the photographer can have infinite focus front to back with a wide-open aperture.  So conceivably – if I could remotely see to focus properly/manually – I could have the rock on which I’m standing be in focus, as well as the furthest rock peak, as well as the moon.  All on the widest aperture.  But alas.  It was dark.  I’m practically blind.  And I didn’t quite pull off that feat.  But still, I like resulting image.  I’m calling it art.  It’ll be our little secret that my out of focus areas weren’t intentional.