I’ve been playing around with Tilt-Shift photography. I don’t really know if that’s the term for it, but the type of photo it takes is taken with a lens that can tilt and/or shift. I have no know idea what that means. Anyways what you get with these lenses is a picture that looks like a minature railway set; that is everything in the focussed area of the picture looks like toys (this page is awesome!).
I’ve been emulating this type of photography with the aid of Photoshop and an online tutorial. It’s actually really quick to do, only a few clicks here or there. Although the lens blur takes awhile depending on the resolution of your photo and your computer speed (mine is slow). There is however, one KEY step that the tutorial misses, and that is to invert your selection after the quick mask.
One thing I found about this whole thing is the quality of the effect relies on your source material. If you take a picture where things are already tiny, then the effect will make them look like toys. If not, then it just looks odd. So after spending a lot of time looking through my photos I created what I think was a decent one (original is below):
Actually I think I’ve been experimenting so much with this effect that I can see through it now, so it makes perfecting the effect rather difficult.