that’s whacked

my first fake tilt-shift

Tuesday, Nov 18. 2008  –  Category: Photos

i was messing around with trying to replicate the tilt-shift photographic effect in Photoshop and GIMP tonight. except GIMP crashed on me. repeatedly. anyway, here’s my first attempt:

this is a shot i took from the Petronas Towers’ SkyBridge in Kuala Lumpur back in March of 2007 when i was in Malaysia for a Tech Days conference. i think the blur is a little too narrow, but it generally achieves the effect. i think i probably should have cropped the skyline out since that sort of breaks the illusion of it being a model but this is otherwise a semi-decent attempt. the overhead shot is conducive to this effect since that’s how we usually look at models.

that being said, i wanted to try it on a head-on/street-level shot to see what my mind would make of it when trying to interpret the focus (or lack there-of). so here’s my second shot:

this is from our honeymoon last year, when Wendy and I were riding bikes through Kyoto. again, lots of sky - though the effect is okay since the sky is pretty uniformly washed out. the people really give it away here since i set the focus at Wendy’s level, and she’s clearly too detailed to be a toy person.

i know some people disparage this effect… i happen to really like it since it encourages perception of a landscape (especially an urban one such as Kuala Lumpur) as a model… and well, going off on mental tangents from there is enough to entertain my mind for at least a few hours. i’m not that into it that i want to go out and buy a tilt-shift lens or anything for my camera, so i’ll settle for cheap Photoshop tricks instead.

Tags: tilt-shift