DrPablo
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Kerry Pierce wrote:
Very cool photo.  But, unless I need new glasses, I don't think the corners, especially the bottom right, are as sharp as the rest. It wouldn't necessarily be, unless your film plane and focus plane were exactly square to the gate.
Regardless, the gate does not appear to me to be the subject. The gate enhances the effect of the photo, but I would not look for detail in the gate. If it were mine, I wouldn't want anyone looking for detail in the gate and might deliberately set up off square, to ensure that the plane of focus produced OOF areas on the edges.
If the guard weren't there and the gate were your subject, then that would be a different story and I would agree that you'd prolly want sharp corners with gate detail equal. Much tougher shot to pull off, while maintaining very shallow DOF, unless you have a lens that is good at flat field focus. 
Thanks for the thoughts, Kerry.
I never said this was perfect execution of the shallow DOF / sharp corners issue. But I did say that that was my goal (and a reasonable one at that). I was using a $70 Canon 50 f/1.8 lens, which is great for the price but in the end it is a bargain lens. -- and this is a perfect argument as to why one may want equipment that provides sharpness in the corners even with a wide aperture.
While getting the guard in perfect focus was my #1 goal, I still obviously wanted a strong counterpoint between the in-focus gate and the out-of-focus background, and there's nothing wrong with having a sharp secondary subject!!
Because the DOF was shallow, the guard was physically in front of the gate, and the lens was cheap, I didn't get the gate perfectly sharp. If I'd stopped down a little more I might have pulled this off better, and the presidential palace in the background would have still been sufficiently out of focus.
Now Kerry, don't be a curmudgeon -- I want you to admit that however imperfect, this photo is one example of a photo where corner sharpness and shallow DOF are simultanously desirable. If you don't, then I'm going to have to start posting more photos until you finally relent!! 
BTW -- thanks Pavel and John.
Pavel wrote:Funny, I recall a minor bit of derision on the odd occasion here when one mentions the edge softness of some canon wides. Why then all of a sudden is it a viable request to have sharp edges?
That's the achilles heel in the Canon lineup, though. While they have very good lenses in the wide range, they're just not the same as their legendary lenses in longer focal lengths (both zooms and primes). And that's exactly why Canon just announced a new make of its 16-35 f/2.8L -- because Canon execs don't want to log onto the Alternative forum at Fred Miranda and find that people are indeed adapting the Nikon 17-35 for their full frame Canons. The MTF of the new Canon 16-35 looks much better than the old one at the periphery.
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