Tuesday, February 8, 2011

tilt shift photography might be my new favorite

I've heard a little about this tilt-shift photography, and my camera has the option to do it, but I never really understood what was supposed to happen, or more importantly- how to make it happen.

After looking at a bunch of examples, now I get it, and it's da bomb. It's like the ski resort video I posted a little while back. Everything that's pictured looks like a miniature, toy set of what it is, even though it's a regular sized scene.













There's also this video from Mardi Gras last year!



It's become my new goal to figure out how to do this and come up with some of my own. I'm no professional photographer, but I do consider myself to be pretty good. Now I just need to figure out the special effects like this.

Any tips/suggestions from the pros would obviously be appreciated.

love,
elizabethany

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Tilt shift photography is actually REALLY done with a tilt shift lens (Which cost thousands of dollars: http://bit.ly/lJ6Ft). The real use for the tilt-shift lens is architectural photography. It allows you to control the converging lines on large buildings.

You can see it in this example: http://bit.ly/i26bzY

The parallel lines in the left image are converging toward the top of the image while the image on the right, thanks to the tilt-shift lens, makes all the lines appear straight and parallel.

Now what you want to do, and what your digital camera does, is simulate one of the effects of a tilt-shift lens. Because the tilt-shift lens moves back and forth and side to side it allows you to play with the plane of focus. Our eyes associate miniature objects with a very small plane of focus.

There are 4 ways to do the tilt-shift photography.
1) Use an actual tilt-shift lens
2) Use the tilt-shift effect in your camera (not sure I'd recommend this since usually those kind of settings are hard to customize)
3) Use Photoshop - You can find a tutorial here http://bit.ly/gIyujH
4) Use a website - http://tiltshiftmaker.com/

The secret to getting the best possible effect is to make sure you're ABOVE your subject looking down at it. The effect won't look very good if you're on the same level. Try to keep as much sky out of the shot as possible.

Have fun!

Unknown said...

Also, one quick added tip: raise the color saturation of the final image. It's another way to trick the viewer's eyes into thinking it's seeing something miniature.

Also, if you've seen the movie "The Social Network", they shot the rowing competition scene with a tilt-shift lens.

Here's the scene, if you haven't seen it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zatmdqTYivI

Ray said...

Hey what kind of Camera do you use? My Canon Powershot SX130IS has faux tilt shift.

I made a little blog to show some VIDEOS I made with it. Check it out>
http://tilt-shift-photography.blogspot.com/2011/02/example-of-tilt-shift-video.html