Learned a new trick
If you’ve been watching Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse (as you should be) you may have noticed in the opening credit sequence their use of a very cool photographic technique often referred to as “tilt-shift” photography. Wide angle shots characteristically have a very deep focus, but by changing the angle of the lens to the film plane (by tilting and/or shifting the lens) you can create wide images with a very narrow depth of field. When you take a wide image from a high perspective and apply a very selective focus, it mimics the results of a macro lens shooting something very small from above. In other words, you can make things look like they are tiny miniatures by manipulating the focus. It makes things look dollhouse size (get it!) and a really good tilt-shift video can be startling and confusing when you see people walking around inside something that is apparently a miniature.
Here’s an ok video of the effect from YouTube. Turn down your volume though, the music counteracts all the effort that went into making it watchable.
A tilt-shift lens that creates the effect in camera is prohibitively expensive, so I tried following some internet tutorials to create the effect in Photoshop. The first picture is an unaltered photo I took from the balcony of a resort hotel I stayed at in Puerto Vallarta. The second picture is the tilt-shift version I worked out, and it isn’t perfect but the difference is pretty interesting. Click the thumbnails for full size.
Download a high resolution version of the tilt-shift image here.
Now that I know I can do this, I plan to let the wide angle lens off the leash in the near future.