Out of focus

I keep repeating, but I had orbital decompression surgery on Monday. My face, especially around my eyes, looked like I had a rough night at fight club. After a week of alternating use of an ice pack for twenty minutes on, and twenty minutes off, and lots of bed rest, and being mentally unfocused due to strong pain medications, I can finally see out of both eyes. I am still on several medications, including whole-body anti-biotics and in-eye anti-biotics which I apply three times a day to both eyes. I have a double vision which the doctors expect will go away on its own or I will require additional surgery. I'll know more at my post-surgery appointment on Monday.

This week, I had not expected to submit a post for Frank's Photo Challenge. Until today, I had not even thought about the weekly challenge. I was focused on recovering from surgery. But I was skipping through the WordPress Reader, with a patch over my left eye, and saw a response to the photo challenge and out of curiosity, I looked for this week's keyword and started laughing. Focus!!

Due to cataract surgery on my left several years ago, I had to choose the type of lens I wanted. I opted for distance vision. With the left eye, I can focus on objects that are further than two meters or more from my sight. Soon after that, I had laser surgery, phase reactive keratotomy, in my right eye, which allows me to focus on the nearby objects that are two-metres or less from my right eye. My brain combines both images to enable stereoscopic vision so that I can drive safely, read a screen, a book, and watch a movie.

Of course, seeing two of every car as I drive isn't ideal. With my post-surgery diplopia, I can't focus on anything in front of me unless I close one of my eyes. My wife gave me an eye-patch to alternately cover each eye. But when you can see out of one eye only, you lose stereoscopic vision and the ability to determine depth.

So what to do? I wanted to submit an entry.

I decided to save up my energy; it takes a lot out of me to cover one eye long enough to type these words so that I could submit two images. I captured both pictures on my Fujifilm X-T2 with a manual focus 35mm film lens, my Asahi SMC Takumar 55mm f/2. For the first image, I used the focus-peaking feature of the Fujifilm X-T2 to help me find the proper focus for the image. For the other, I focus on using just my eyes. I expect one image is sharper than the other.

The out-o-focus image is a decent depiction of what my vision was like a day after surgery.

I used Luis Costa's monochrome film simulation recipe, which I found via Ritchie Roesch's [Not] My Fujifilm X-Pro2 Tri-X Push-Process Film Simulation Recipe post. The last time I shot a monochrome film was in college in the mid-'80s. I don't remember explicitly shooting Tri-X, but I do remember capturing a lot of monochrome images. I don't know if this Tri-X recipe is close to Tri-X or not, but I like the way it looks.