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:
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.
