Tilt-Shift Photography
The art of tilt-shift photography, or tilt-shift miniaturization, allows a picture of a real scene to give the illusion that it is a zoomed-in capture of a small model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene appear much smaller than it actually is. Essentially it makes real life look like the scenery in a model train set. The technique first appeared in the music video for Harrowdown Hill by Thom Yorke from Radiohead. This originally achieved by using a lens tilted and shifted with respect to the image plane, combined with a large aperture, to create the very shallow depth of field.
Miniature Basketball — don’t they look like little models?
However, nowadays post production digital processes have replaced the traditional mechanical tilt-shift miniaturization, including the new art of tilt-shift video. Inspired by the tilt-shift photography of Olivio Barbiere, several artists at Bent Image Lab in Portland, Oregon, created Smallgantics, a digital post production technique to simulate miniature cinematography on full scale filmed sequences. Simply put, Smallgantics makes duplicates of video frames and then breaks them into sections applying varying degrees of blur. This makes tilt-shift videos that are incredibly convincing. You NEED to watch this video:
Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
The video above is called Bathtub IV and was filmed and edited by Keith Loutit, you can find more of his entrancing work online. The gallery below shows before and after examples of tilt-shifting. How cool is that?
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- Soak City Before
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- Soak City After
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- London Before
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- London After
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- Rock Pile Before
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- Rock Pile After
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- Hollywood Hotel Before
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- Hollywood Hotel After
These last two shots are stills from Harrowdown Hill, the artwork that started it all.
May 19th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
[...] you liked this you may also like these other photo related posts: Tilt Shift Photography High Speed Photography Motion Blur Photography Macro Insect [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:37 am
wow
June 6th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Over here from PW’s site. I am a DSLR newbie and am overjoyed to learn of yet another photo-geeky technique. Thanks for sharing!