Tilt Shift Photography is the technique of using either your camera with a special tilting lens or a software to make your pictures look as if they are miniatures. By altering the photograph in such a way as if you have used a macro lens with a very shallow depth of field. In this wasy you can make a life size image appear as it it is a miniature.

You also need to make the images more vivid so that the different elements in the photograph seem unreal or toy like. This is usually done by increasing the saturation and contrast of the image.

Tilt shift effect can be applied with really expensive tilting lenses or with really expensive software like Photoshop, or you can use what I use, GIMP, or you can use a free online tool at tiltshiftmaker.com.

The images that work best are the kind that have been taken from a height and are a large landscape. If you have a few people or cars in the photograph, it looks even better. However, the examples with too many people and cars tends to make people suspicious and make the miniature look fake. So having a few cars and people is good but not too many.

I have used both GIMP and tiltshiftmaker for these effects and find that both are really simple and it is basically a toss up between the two. However, you will need to adjust the contrast and saturation of the images locally before you use tiltshifmaker online. I have tried to use both tools for the images in this post. With GIMP I can decide how much I want to blur the outer areas which is something that I can’t do in tiltshiftmaker. But in the interest of saving time and effort I finally did the colour adjustments in GIMP and the tilt shifting at tiltshiftmaker.

So without further ado, the results of my experimenting are below.

This is a photograph of a Toronto Interchange / cloverleaf

The next set is of a small resort that I went to on the outskirts of Delhi.

The next few are shots of Toronto when I was landing.

The next shot is of a waterfall in India near the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam.

There’s a lot more to see in various places on the net and its all good. For the time being you can head over to Smashing Magazine’s post featuring 50 such shots or see more examples at tiltshiftphotography.net or see a GIMP tutorial over at Gimparoo.

Hope you enjoyed this post!

Correction: Miniature fakery is one of the applications of Tilt Shift Photography and not the primary use. It is mostly used by photographers when they want to capture large scale images without distortion and with the same amount of focus throughout the image. It is also use to capture tall subjects like buildings without any distortion. The tilting of the lens allows a larger subject into a smaller frame and the shifting fixes any vertical abberations caused by the tilting, generally pincushioning.