A little experimentation from the other night.

I was working with the big Nikon and shift lens on a tripod, which is an awkward manually-focused combination at the best of times, which this wasn't. So instead of trying for sharpness and treating its absence as a failure, I decided to also try for unsoftness as a goal.

These photos are multiple exposures, starting with one in-focus image and then working through progressively more defocused shots. As something of an in-camera Orton, I also wanted the exposure to be brighter for more pastel colours. Whether they're sucessfull as photos is a question that I leave up to the viewer – click on them to see them bigger, if you wish – but they look like I hoped they would.

There's one thing that I hadn't anticipated. Because the shift lens was off-axis, the blurred images aren't centred on the focused one, giving a sense of movement. I like the effect, and may need to work with that some more.