This week I learned a technique for making a scene look like a miniature model. The idea is to take a photograph with an extremely short depth of field that would normally be associated with a macro lens. There are a couple of ways to accomplish this: get a field or view camera or a tilt-shift lens and angle the film plane across your image so the plane of focus is on a very small portion of your photograph; or what I did... use Photoshop. The Photoshop approach was by far the cheapest as a tilt-shift lens can run you $2500, and I already have Photoshop Elements.
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Canon Rebel XTi,
ISO 400, f/8, 1/400s |
Creating this effect in Photoshop is quite simple. Copy the layer, apply a Gaussian Blur and a layer mask to the copied layer and selectively mask out the parts of the photo you want to remain clear. The only trick I found to the whole process was that I needed to apply effect and then do something else for a little while before looking at the picture again in order to see the miniature I was trying to mimic and not just a blurry picture.
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Canon 20D, Canon 17-85mm Lens,
ISO 400, f/16, 1/160s |
Other advice I found when looking up this techniques was: boost contrast and saturation, take a picture from above and scenes with cars or people in them work well. I would add to that, take pictures of clean and un-worn scenes. I think the cross-walk lines that have been worn out and the spring grit partially covering the centre line in the image above detract from the idea that this scene is a model. After all, no one is going to make a model that looks a little old and tired.
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