Tilt shift photography – it’s something to do with rotating camera lenses and the movement of the lens parallel to the image plane. If you’re like me and have only ever pointed a camera at something and pressed the “take photo” button, that’ll mean to you the same as it does to me – absolutely nothing.
To do proper tilt shift photography you’ll need expensive lenses and a camera swanky enough that it’d make David Bailey swoon. But the overall effect is pretty cool – it makes a normal photo look like it’s been taken of a miniature model, there’s an example on the left. (Click the image for a big version)
But if you’re not interested in shelling out a small fortune on equipment and have a copy of Photoshop you’re in luck, as you can fake a normal photo to make it look like it’s been tilted and shifted without having to leave the comfort of your own computer chair!
I’m not going to try and go through a tutorial on how to do it, i’m far too much of a Photoshop novice for that. Instead here’s a link to the same guide I used in my first experiment!
My first result was a bit rubbish, as was my second and third. But eventually I managed to get something fairly reasonable and I’ve included it below – click the image to see the full size version. I had hoped that it would look like a load of toy boats but I fear it may just look like a blurry picture of a Greek port.
Let me know what you think and post links to any photos you may have done yourself. Extra points if you’ve done it without Photoshop!
No related posts.
Tags: expensive lenses, greek port, Photoshop, tilt shift photography
[...] was reading a cool blog post about Tilt-Shift Photography where you make the content of a photo look tiny like a toy for [...]
I put a few of my attempts on my blog – http://ben90.com/2009/07/tilt-shift-photography-cheating-with-photoshop/. It looked quite easy, but to get it looking right takes quite a while. I’m a fan of macro photography, so I enjoyed this.
This looks right up my street. Can I get Photoshop for free do you know?
Photoshop is a very expensive, industry standard graphics editing program, and there is a trial here: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop/
Although why not try GIMP, which is a free image editor (still very good though)http://www.gimp.org/
Erm! Why would one want a perfectly good photo to look like one of a minature?
That’s helpful Ryandc – thanks. I’ll take a look at Gimp (!).
Because it’s fun! I’m not replacing the photo, just having a little bit of a play around with it!