Tilt-Shift Photography, Part I

Tilt-shift photography is usually accomplished using a specialized lens type that I don't have. Fortunately, the effect can be faked. What it does is take a large landscape type image, and use blurs to trick your brain into perceiving it as a scale model. It's a lot harder to explain with words than with pictures, so here you go.



click to enlarge, or see it on Flickr


I faked that image in Photoshop; it really is just a picture of a street in New York from a high vantage point. As you can see, I didn't do a perfect job on it—if you look up faked tilt-shift pictures, you'll find ones that are done much more convincingly. This group on Flickr, for example, has a number of excellent shots.

There are a number of ways to fake tilt-shift photography, none of which I want to explain. There are tutorials out there for Photoshop, but the easiest way is to just use Tilt-Shift Maker. I've never tried it personally, but I've seen an image that came out of it, and it was quite well-done.

Feel free to leave me feedback, especially constructive criticism (that goes for all my posts; it's why I started this blog). And if you have a great tilt-shift picture to show the world, post a link to it in the comments!