I know there are PS filters to achieve this look, but there’s something uber cool about some genuine tilt-shift lens action! For those of you not familiar with these lenses, tilt-shift lenses are realistically intended to be a corrective lens – architecture photographers often use them to straighten the edges of buildings so it doesn’t look like the walls are curved (like you get if you use a wide-angle to shoot a very tall building like the Empire State).
There’s also an excellent article in the tech behind tilt-shift on photo.net
However, tilt-shift lenses also have a pretty cool side effect – it’s easy to get an extremely shallow depth of field that is shaped along a plane!! What does this mean? Well, instead of a shallow DoF you get with a normal lens (which is a circle at the centre of the lens, and the bokeh appears more pronounced as you move further away from the centre to the outer edges), tilt-shifts have a horizontal or vertical DoF plane – which results in some amazing effects!!
A long explanation I know, but tilt-shift is the original method used to turn big, well known city scapes into images that look like model railroad miniatures. And finally one photographer has gone one further, and made some stop motion videos of Florida Disney World.
Check the full article here and watch the video too!!
One Comment
These photographs are getting so popular now – there’s an exhibition about the “illusion of reality” in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence at the moment, and one of the main installations were photographs using a tilt-shift lens. Everything looks so fake, it really messes with my eyes!
These kinds of photographs are also all over almost every European train station I’ve been to in the last two months in Eurail advertisements. The people look so unreal, they really look like photographs of miniature set ups.