Friday, May 01, 2009

Toy cars

I started hearing about tilt-shift photography not very long ago. It's probably been around for a while.
I was impressed by Karen's toy jeep and today found tiltshiftmaker.com (via Cool Tools), where I made my own crude examples from photos of cars in my neighborhood. That's a 1956 Lincoln Premiere above and a 1963 Chevy Biscayne below.
A very particular kind of photo lends itself to this treatment: preferably taken from above, with lots of foreground and background and small points of interest near the middle. The manipulation of focus is one part of fooling your brain into thinking you're looking at a miniature. The other part is using photos of things that could conceivably be miniatures, such as cars or boats or model railroad scenery.

I don't take a lot of such photos, as it turns out, but maybe I'll try snapping a few now with tilt-shift in mind.

7 comments:

  1. I first saw tilt shift a couple months ago, my brain still can't figure it out.

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  2. Cool! I have never heard of tilt shift photography - I assume you need an SLR.
    They really do look like miniatures.

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  3. Vicki, it has to do with focus. When you look at something small and close, everything else blurs out. So if you take a photo and blur out everything but a small area in the middle, it makes that thing seem like it's a miniature.

    Thanks, Julie.

    Natashya, you don't need an SLR. I don't have one. I just ran these through the tiltshift website's tool. You could also use Photoshop.

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  4. Very cool. I think I'll have to try this sometime. I wonder how it would make a person look.

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