One of the less practical for every day use pieces of camera equipment is a tilt-shift lens. The lens lets you tilt or shift the plane of focus so its not parallel to the lens to create a number of effects. Normally this is used for distortion correction when shooting buildings from the vantage point of ground level or to draw emphasis to a subject.
Good versions of these lenses run upwards of $700 and thus aren’t’ exactly something I would run out to get given that its mainly used as a gimmick effect (think of how fish-eye lenses are used as a gimmick as well).
Anyways, I spent some time in Photoshop to see if I could recreate the effect to a reasonable level of success to save money. Turns out I could.
Let me start of by saying that these photos are only meant as examples and not meant to be passed off as photojournalism in any way shape or form. I looked through old photos I had and that’s why these all look familiar to long time readers of this blog.
 |
| One of the side effects of tilt-shift lenses is their ability to make aerial shots of things look like miniatures. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Related posts:
Graduated Gaussian Blur…
I enjoyed it when I had the T/S lenses in my bag. I didn’t have to deal with the photoshop work later on, and it was a great challenge to shoot with the lens. The new TS-E 17mm f/4L would be a GEM to use in the desert or around large buildings.
http://www.photosbyms.com/photoblog/index.php?x=browse&category=71
actually, its a graduated lens blur filter using layer masks
The protest shot is pretty cool. Like the toy-ish looking first shot too.