Tilt-Shift for the win!

This is awesome:


Bathtub II from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

(I saw it from Frederick V. Johnson’s Twitter.)

Wait, what was that?

It’s “Tilt-shift photography”. (Well that and some time compression.) The gist of it is this: you tilt the camera lens respective to the sensor, meaning that the focal plane is no longer parallel to the sensor. This basically screws up the depth-of-field information and for some odd reason the human mind interprets that as “miniatures”. That footage is shot at Sydney Harbor and apparently doesn’t even have post-processing. If you want to see more the photographer is Keith Loutit and his blog has more goodness. Check it out.

Comments

[whiskey]

Would this suggest that more successful photography of scale miniatures, so that they would look more like full sized objects, could be achieved by “correcting” the focal plane and sensor plane alignments?

(This is actually Tim reposting a comment made by whiskey that got lost in a DB crash. See my http://www.hiddenjester.com/~tsanders/?p=641" rel="nofollow">longer explanation. Sorry for any confusion.)

[Timothy Sanders]

Interesting thought. Maybe? I think it’d be difficult to shoot though. So there are a couple of things at work here. One is that using a very shallow depth of field makes it look like macro photography. In theory then, using an extensive DoF on a miniature shot might scale it up. Another is the tilting-down of the lens reinforces a “shooting from above” perspective in addition to oddly moving the focal plane. So if you could shoot from BELOW the minis, looking up it would probably make them look bigger.

But at the same time it wouldn’t look like a “normal” camera shot. The tilt-shift thing mimics a camera perspective we’re used to seeing, but shooting from ground level up at subjects is an unusual item. I don’t know, it’s one of those things where I’d have to see it in action, and I don’t have a tilt-shift lens to play with