Fake Tilt-Shift Photography

As many of you know, I love miniatures and miniature photography particularly when it has to do with moon bases and space trains (and more than likely said moon bases and space trains blowing up). Anyhow, there is a type of photography you may have heard of called tilt-shift photography which makes things look like miniatures by altering the point of focus and mimicking the focal plane of a macro lens, making the human eye think the subject is much smaller than it actually is.

Stupidly, Wikipedia has a whole entry on "tilt-shift miniature faking" which I think is such a stupid name for it, because it's not really faking anything. If you built a highly detailed miniature, you'll photographic to look real, but you also want people to know you've made a highly detailed miniature.

Regardless, tilt-shift lenses are staggeringly expensive and since I don't even have a nice SLR to attach a fancy-pantsy lens to, I had to settle for some point and shoot pics I took while out and about in Long Beach yesterday, then used photoshop to create a macro lens effect and heavily saturated the color. Tilt-shift photography works best from high angles, but I didn't have access to any high angles of the city (Jesse- can I come by your loft with my camera one day?), so I just took some street level photos.

These are the ones that worked the best.







Also, if any resident optics nerds have anything to add, feel free.