How do you make a picture look like a model

S

SAVA9E

Suspended / Banned
Messages
504
Name
Paul
Edit My Images
Yes
Ive seen photographs of buildings and people that look more like miniature models, how do you achieve this.
 
tilt shift lens generally although it can be faked to a certain extent
 
If you're going to fake it with photoshop or similar, be very careful about how you compose the image. A genuine tilt-focussed shot has a plane of focus, a faked-tilt shot has applied blur gradients - if the shot isn't composed with this effect in mind it's very easy for the end result to scream "Fake!" and be ineffective because the focus illusion doesn't make any visual sense to the viewer.
 
Just had a play in CS5 with a couple of old pictures

London.jpg


Modelbeach.jpg
 
Chris - I think it's down to visual perception, the depth of field of human vision decreases as the subject is brought closer to your eye. Try threading a needle and you'll notice the effect.

Paul - the effect always looks better to me when the in-focus area (either genuine or faked) contains something on a human scale, either people or a vehicle. I think the beach shot would work better if the unblurred zone was lowered to pick-up the figures on the beach. But the beach example also shows the inherent problems with faking the effect, you couldn't logically have part of the near headland in focus as well as part of the far headland and part of the far beach without having everything inbetween them in focus.
 
The Canon S95, and so I'm assuming other cameras, has the option to get this effect in camera. I haven't been in a position to get a good scene to show off the effect yet though. :shake:

I have done the effect in Photoshop and it's good fun. :)
 
Yeah they are bad pics to start with, London was from the eye so lots of reflection and dirt on the windows and the beach wasnt in complete focus to start with. Both taken years ago and the only thing i had to try with but i love the effect.
 
Quite simple how it works: Lens and film/sensor are normally both in the same plane so the DOF zone is also in the same plane. Tilt/shift lenses tilt the lens so that it is not on the same plane to the sensor and consequently the DOF runs at that angle across the scene, creating a the weird DOF.
 
SAVA9E said:
Blimey you need a degree in mathematics to read that page, cant we just stick to it makes pics look like models lol
Click to expand...

Ha :) That's all the gumf I let someone else learn - I just played with 5x4" cameras and got some nice results. Never tried the stuff you want to do but did a lot of product photography where you needed to get front0-to-back sharpness, which is where this technique comes into play.
 
have a butchers here - some of the best i've ever seen :D
 
Yeah some really nice ones there. I think the secret is to have a subject that could be a model and thats why the train station one works.
 
Alastair said:
Chris - I think it's down to visual perception, the depth of field of human vision decreases as the subject is brought closer to your eye. Try threading a needle and you'll notice the effect.
Click to expand...

I suspect it's more because we've become habituated to seeing the effect in photographs of models.
 
Musicman said:
I suspect it's more because we've become habituated to seeing the effect in photographs of models.
Click to expand...

I've very rarely seen models photographed in this way. The slinkachu style is done with a shallow depth of field, but that's done almost as a parody of the effect. Model railway layouts (which the effect is usually most reminiscent of) seem to be normally photographed with an overabundance of depth of field. There's a visual perception thing going on with tilt-focus images.
 
The other, if somewhat obvious, thing that helps is to have a high camera position. When taking pictures of models they tend to be small so the usual camera position is looking down on them.

Funnily enough when I've taken pictures of real model train layouts I've attempted to get as low as possible and use a small aperture to minimize the effect. ;)
 
^ fixed it for you

[YOUTUBE]9TTB6hKxKzE[/YOUTUBE]
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top