The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

COUNTER FOCUS

The forward tilt on the previous pages is a solution for improving the subjective impression of sharpness in an image, but as we saw in Selective and Color-wash earlier, on pages 106–111, you might want the opposite. The tilting lens can help here too, if you put it into reverse, so to speak. I call it counter-focus, though that’s just my term for it. Tilt back on a scene that is tilting forward, and you can get the most extreme selective focus possible—with the aperture wide open, naturally. I wanted to do this here, in a scriptorium where scribes were working on a handwritten bible, because I wanted to focus entirely on only some words. It’s a standard focal-length lens, tilted right back; and for good measure, as I was using ...