Tilt Shift Fun
Tilt shift refers to the practice in photography of moving the camera’s lens to direct a viewer’s gaze from a part of the image the photographer wishes to de-emphasize. This can be applied to provide a diorama, or miniature, view of a real life scene. It is especially effective when done from a high angle, looking down on a subject such as you would a model set.
On the camera, the movement entails the rotation of the lens relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Usually in practice tilt is used with a high aperature to achieve a shallow depth of field. Most lens manufacturers have special glass available for this type of photography. Canon offers the wide angle lens TS-E 24mm f/3.5L for around $1,150. Lensbaby offers substantially lower cost options.
Luckily for those of us on limited budgets there are ways to fake tilt shift minatures. tiltshiftmaker.com makes it as easy as uploading an image to your favorite photo site. It seriously cannot get any easier than this. You upload your image, center the area of the picture you want to focus, choose the width of the focus, hit submit and bingo, you’ve got an instant miniature. The interface provides a preview of your new image with the option to modify it or download when you are happy with it.
The fun part of this site is finding old images to use. Its addicting. My first visit to the site lasted over an hour as I tried different shots to see how they would turn out. Here are two examples from a civil war reenactment we attended last fall. Click the images to see them in original size and better definition.
| Before | After |
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As you can see, a good crop before applying the tilt shift helps. I especially like the second one, it reminds me of the toy soldiers I played with as a kid.
For those that like the hands on approach there is also procedures for tilt shift miniature faking in Photoshop and other post-processing software. A good tutorial on using Photoshop for this can be found at site Tilt-Shift Photography.
More examples can be seen at Smashing Magazine and the Tilt Shift Miniature Fakes Group at Flickr.
Stay wide and be prepared to zoom!
Marc…
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January 31st, 2009 at 4:34 am
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Have fun creating miniatures from your real life images….