It's so cool to see someone building their own optics, this shot looks beautiful!

Cheers Tommy... The design is about as simple as it gets, the sauce is more in making it usable, useful, and effective. Soft focuses lenses require you throw out a lot of rules about focusing and to a very large extent composition and image management. This shot (and most of the set) for example needed some insane front tilt to keep the whole scene behind the plane of focus. The roots here are on the ground at an angle, but not a terribly steep one, so the natural arrangement puts part of them in front of focus and some behind - the issue is, with most styles of soft lenses, the rendering in front of and behind focus is substantially different. Your useful depth of field is also exclusively *behind* the plane of maximum sharpness, and not at all before; plus, the plane of maximum sharpness is behind the plane of maximum perceived sharpness, the plane you'll focus on intuitively if you've used a view camera before with an anastigmat. It's really a whorl of stuff you've got to content with to make the most effective images. Do it right and you can get staggering results; do it wrong and you'll get soggy bokeh and unpleasantly-unsharp pictures.

Also amusing, while this lens barely shows any astigmatism when shot parallel to the film plane, it shows a lot when tilted. I assure you that whatever looks like motion blur in this set (pronounced on 3 and 4), is actually astigmatism.