I first ran into this tilt-shift effect in Harper’s Magazine a few years ago. You make a regular photograph look like a photo of small things taken by a macro lens. This is done by messing with the “focus” of the photo. Done right, the subject looks like an impossibly elaborate model.
I like that this is playing with assumptions that are built on artifacts of a technology. If macro lens users could have avoided it, they wouldn’t have so much of the photo out of focus. But they must, so they learn to use it to their advantage and we, the audience, grow to understand the fuzziness of macro shots as part of our shared visual language. And then Photoshop turns all that upside-down. Sweet.
Vincent Lafloret has my favorite example of this:
If I was better at model building, I’d do a series of photograph pairs, one of something real, post-processed with this tilt-shift effect, paired with a photo of a model with a macro lens.
Instead, thanks to tiltshiftmaker.com, I started playing with the treatment with some photos I’d already taken.
So this photo from inside the Basilica in Montserrat:
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Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. It was drafted by those who looked around the world of the eighteenth century and saw persecution, torture, and other crimes against humanity and believed that America could be better than that.
– Leon Panetta, “No Torture. No exceptions.“
Meridian Hill Park, which is also known as Malcolm X Park, is at 16th Street NW and W Street NW in Washington, DC. It was built from 1914 to 1936. I had been told that it was created as part of a campaign to make Washington the host of the Prime Meridian. Many cities were vying for the privilege of hosting the arbitrary marker, and in the same way that a city will build a stadium to encourage the Olympic Committee, Washington organized Meridian Hill Park.
Here’s a shot that captures the… sloppiness that can be found there:
Though it’s a little down-at-the-heels, Meridian Hill Park still has an air of importance. Even if it’s an importance that’s mostly forgotten. For that reason, I think it’s a very romantic place.
Or so I thought. Wikipedia tells me that I’m wrong. Completely.
“Meridian” in “Meridian Hill Park” does not refer to the Prime Meridian. It actually refers to the “Washington Meridian“, which runs through the US Naval Observatory. Somehow, it cuts through the Observatory and through the park, 10 blocks east, where we find this plaque:
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The idea for this came from Charlie Sorrel. I like the idea of carrying around a moleskine instead of an iPhone, mostly because I like the aesthetics of the Moleskine. They have a great weight and they’re handsome. The iPhone is pleasing in its own way, but it feels slippery. On the other hand, adding the overhead of the Moleskine form factor is a serious liability. So I went into this ambivalent.
I started with the reporter’s notebook, ’cause I like the idea of making it a flip-phone. Also, I don’t actually like the reporter’s notebook form factor for note-taking, so this one had been lying around for a while. It’s grid-ruled, which makes the measuring a little easier.
As you can see, the iPhone could fit snugly inside this form factor.
I started cutting with a knife. Not great. There was a big risk of cutting myself, and it doesn’t look that clean when you’re done. If I had to do it again, I think I’d use a Dremel. As it was, I had to hack with the knife a lot and use the scissors to fine tune. The result was a raggedy, but sufficient for what I’d decided was going to be a proof of concept.
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So now we’re going to try something different. The only way to improve is with practice, and we’d like to get better at being a creative, vital influence on the rest of the world. The day job just isn’t cutting it.
So every day, we’ll be creating something. It might be a photograph, an art project, a mix tape, or even just a considered blog post… but everyday, *every day*, we’ll be putting something back into the world.
Today, of course, is the redesign of the site.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
