Tilt-shift effect makes fake miniatures

[andygates]

I do like a new trick...



Tilt-shift lenses are heinously expensive.  The effect - which involves getting a weird depth of field by tilting the lens so that the plane of focus isn't parallel with the film/sensor - is kinda dreamy and hallucinatory, and makes everything look like it's a shot from Staggeringly Realistic Model Maker Monthly's "trippy cities" special.

[Becky]

Ben Kinetics has been having a go with tiltshift photography too.

I especially like the one he did of two toy trains.

[andygates]

Schweet!   

[kyuss]

There's a really good cycling one here.

[pcolbeck]

I love those.

[Hello, I am Bruce]

There's a fantastic movie of Sydney harbour here: http://vimeo.com/1831024?pg=embed&sec=1831024&hd=1.

I've never quite understood what the lenses are supposed to be for.  Are they actually for doing the opposite of fake miniatures? -- i.e. increasing depth of field.

[redshift]

I've never quite understood what the lenses are supposed to be for.  Are they actually for doing the opposite of fake miniatures? -- i.e. increasing depth of field.

Tilt changes the plane of the depth of field so that objects at different distances are in focus at the same time, shift changes the plane through the centres of the lenses, whilst keeping them parallel.
When (plate | rollfilm) cameras had bellows, you could sometimes shift the objective lens with respect to the film plane, usually to adjust a wide-angle shot (say, a building) so that the verticals remained straight.  35mm SLRs lacked that capability, and building shots on wideangle lenses invariably ended up with converging verticals due to the camera not being parallel to the building sides.  Eventually someone thought to make a lens that allowed you to achieve similar shots to the bellows cameras.

I've never owned one, but I did once run a rollfilm through an old Coronet bellows camera, and the effects whilst not the same, are somewhat similar - the lens is of relatively poor quality, and the aberrations mean that the focus falls off towards the edges anyway.  Unfortunately, I haven't got those pictures in digital format (have you seen the price of Medium Format scanners?    )

[rogerzilla]

The reason the pictures look like models is that we associate shallow depth of field with close-up shots.  These lenses (or a 5 x 4 camera) can affect depth of field, giving unexpected results.

Their most common use is to avoid converging verticals in architecture shots.

[David Martin]

Tilt shift is standard practice in large format photography. The trick is to get the plane of the film, theplane of the lens and the plane you want in focus all to converge at the same point. That is the tilt part and you cna use it to gain a selective focus (as seen in the images posted) or to increase depth of field.

The shift part affects the perspective. Coming back to the parallel bit, if you place your film parallel to the object being photographed, and the lens at a point where it can cast an image on the film of the thing you want to photograph, then the image will have the proper perspective. The lens is  shifted with respect to the film.

Lots of fun, but quite pricey to run a large format camera.

..d 

[JT]

Lots of fun, but quite pricey to run a large format camera.

How to use Photoshop's Lens Blur tool for tilt-shift fakery

[TimO]

An informative thread, and some interesting pictures!

Those pictures do look amazingly like the photos my brother used to have in his Model Railway magazine!

(Phew, luckily he got them when I was a kid, so I don't have to admit to having ever bought any!

With modern digital cameras and digital manipulation it's realtively trivial to straighten up the sides of buildings, although it won't solve depth of field issues, so I suppose you have to make sure you use a suitably small aperture and long exposure in the first place.

[David Martin]

Lots of fun, but quite pricey to run a large format camera.

How to use Photoshop's Lens Blur tool for tilt-shift fakery

That only works one way. Using tilt shift to get great depth of field in a model pic is not possible with photoshop.

..d

[andygates]

Well, yeeees, but that's kinda obvious: you can't make something from nothing.  I can no more add depth of field than I can add stuff that was off-shot!

You can make stylish nothing from something, though.

[Jaded]

Even The Time is in to it now!

How to make Wembley look like a Subbuteo pitch | International Football - Times Online

The printed version is way better than this online one.

[Really Ancien]

Lots of fun, but quite pricey to run a large format camera.

How to use Photoshop's Lens Blur tool for tilt-shift fakery

That only works one way. Using tilt shift to get great depth of field in a model pic is not possible with photoshop.

..d

It's not anything to do with depth of field, Any sense of perspective we have depends on a natural vanishing point, lenses of a different focal length alter this, but if we have obvious cues such as railway tracks and these behave as if the object is a lot smaller then we will perceive them as such. Stretch the top of the picture and that will move the vanishing point.

Damon.

[αdαmsκι]

I thought this photo from the Guardian looked like a model I didn't know how the affect had been achieved.  I assume it's another photo using a the tilt-shift effect?

[andygates]

Yes indeedy.  Nice one, too. 

[Really Ancien]

I thought this photo from the Guardian looked like a model I didn't know how the affect had been achieved.  I assume it's another photo using a the tilt-shift effect?

It shows how it was manipulated by the way the white lines between the lanes widen as they recede into the background.

Damon.

[rogerzilla]

That's your theory, but the perspective on the "Subbuteo" shot looks pretty normal to me.

Something else these pictures seem to share is pumped-up colour saturation, which increases the unworldly effect.

[David Martin]

I thought this photo from the Guardian looked like a model I didn't know how the affect had been achieved.  I assume it's another photo using a the tilt-shift effect?

It shows how it was manipulated by the way the white lines between the lanes widen as they recede into the background.

Damon.

That could just be the circle of confusion widening.

The reason it looks like a model shot is that we expect a lens with that angle of view to be pretty much at infinity (or hyperfocal anyway) so we expect the whole scene in focus. But we know that close ups of the same perspective have severe depth of field limitations.

So we translate it to being a closeup.

..d

[andygates]

Something else these pictures seem to share is pumped-up colour saturation, which increases the unworldly effect.

Indeedy: that and the hard contrast make it look like it's been painted with bright model paints and illuminated with a spotlight.

[Jaded]

Something else these pictures seem to share is pumped-up colour saturation, which increases the unworldly effect.

Indeedy: that and the hard contrast make it look like it's been painted with bright model paints and illuminated with a spotlight.

Ah. I knew Jordan would appear in this thread at some point.

[Really Ancien]

The reason it looks like a model shot is that we expect a lens with that angle of view to be pretty much at infinity (or hyperfocal anyway) so we expect the whole scene in focus. But we know that close ups of the same perspective have severe depth of field limitations.

So we translate it to being a closeup.

..d

That's the intriguing bit really, do we have to know what models look like and is this interpretation learned. It occured to me that the Gerry Anderson puppet series models would probably have been shot with tilt shift lenses as they used 35mm cameras which would have been difficult to get down onto the same plane as the dioramas they used, so they would have shot from above and corrected with tilt shift. The same was prabably true of railway modelling pictures. Is this effect obvious to someone unfamiliar with the technique applied to models.

Damon.

[David Martin]

The reason it looks like a model shot is that we expect a lens with that angle of view to be pretty much at infinity (or hyperfocal anyway) so we expect the whole scene in focus. But we know that close ups of the same perspective have severe depth of field limitations.

So we translate it to being a closeup.

..d

That's the intriguing bit really, do we have to know what models look like and is this interpretation learned. It occured to me that the Gerry Anderson puppet series models would probably have been shot with tilt shift lenses as they used 35mm cameras which would have been difficult to get down onto the same plane as the dioramas they used, so they would have shot from above and corrected with tilt shift. The same was prabably true of railway modelling pictures. Is this effect obvious to someone unfamiliar with the technique applied to models.

Damon.

It is obvious becasue that is how our eyes work (irrespective of the perspective correction). Look at something close up and the background becomes a blur. Look at something large but far away and the background is in focus. (Father Ted moment).

..d

[Really Ancien]

I've been exploring Depth of Field in relation to video cameras recently, The small size of the CCDs means that video cameras have a greater depth of field relative to a 35 mm camera. Various adapters are used Depth-of-field adapter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia to give the impression of 35mm film. Plate cameras have an even poorer depth of field and of course the type of telephoto lens with a large apertures used by sports photographers have a very tight depth of field. The video upthread was probably taken with a depth of field adapter with tilt shift, something which is fairly easy to acheive. The main use of tilt shift is to correct converging verticals in architectural photography, it is also suitable for correcting perspective. I'm wondering where we learned the visual conventions which lead us to perceive these shots and the photoshop manipulations as being similar to models. Is it because this is how models are shot?

Damon.