Tilt shift photography used to be produced using a Tilt Shift lens. The lens moves the focal point around in the field, so as you tilt it, it will move the top part in focus and move the bottom part out and visa verse.

 

This is used in architectual photography to keep the whole of a building in focus, but also to make an optical illusion for other photographers, to fool a viewer into thinking that the image was taken off a miniaturised scale model.

 

I could explain all day why the effect happens, but basically if the object is 2 meters away from you, and the background is 2 meters further again (so 4 meters from you), then the object is 50% of the way.

 

If you were to take a photo, depth of field would make the foreground and background out of focus, whilst the object 2 meters away would be pin sharp.

 

So if you then placeed that same object in the middle of the road outside your house, and then stood inside your house 20 meters away, the camera would focus on the object and the image a few feet before and after it would also be in focus, depending on the lens and aperture setting. So the whole picture would be close to being sharp if you zoomed into the object, even if it sees the entire road from kerb to kerb in background and foreground. but if you manually forced the back ground and foreground to be out of focus with blur in photoshop, then it would look like the object was sat on your coffee table on a scale down road, hence making it look small and miniature.

 

If any of that made sense .

 

Here are some examples I made in some spare time.

Left image is the Gateshead/Newcastle millennium Bridge, notice how i have kept the top of the bridge in focus, if I had used a tilt shift lens, it would have been forced out of focus even though in real life it is the correct distance away to be in focus, so it would actually be incorrect.

Middle image is an image taken from my friend Steve's facebook gallery (direct link to original image, in-case you cant see it). He took it in in South Africa of a truck park whilst covering the 2010 football world cup and i thought was ideal for tilt shift.

Right image is an idea I have to make a video for a friends band, this is one of the test images to help story board the process.

 

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