Using trick photography, or specifically

the tilt shift effect to take better travel

photos Written by Jim T May (http://trick-photography.org)

We all like to share our travel adventures with our family and friends by taking lots of

photographs of the sights we see. However, we all tend to take photographs that are influenced

by what we've seen before in travel magazines or postcards. This is simply because we like what

we see and will try to recreate that shot when we are actually there. Why not add a twist to it

and use trick photography to create something unconventional and interesting with the tilt shift

special effect?

Tilt shift, faking miniatures, or diorama effect photos are fun and interesting. They make real-

world objects look like miniatures, and give you a sense of how small we really are in this world.

It's like looking at a small-scale model or diorama. Imagine if you are visiting the Colosseum in

Rome, Italy and you climb up high to snap a great photo overlooking the entire structure. You

then apply digital trickery to turn it into a tilt shift photo.

This is actually a fake tilt shift photograph because it's done digitally, and not in-camera. But the

point is that you now have a "toy-version" photo of the Colosseum. Repeat this with the various

landmarks and you have a great collection of toy landmarks photo to impress your family and

friends. You can also give life to your "toy" landmarks by taking multiple tilt shift photos and

combine them into an animated image file or video. Not only will you have more interesting

stories to tell them about how you got the shot, but your photos are likely to be more

interesting than others!

It used to be that to create these tilt shift effect photos you need a special tilt shift lens that

attaches to your camera. They are also called perspective control lens. Their main purpose

wasn't to create miniature or diorama effects but to allow movement of the camera lens

independent of the camera film or sensor. This is used by photographers to avoid convergence

of parallel lines, so when you photograph a tall building from the ground the base of the

building is the same as the top of the building. You see this used a lot in architectural

photographs to avoid parallel lines converging to create a distorted look.

When you tilt the lens, you also produce a wedge-shaped depth of field. When you snap a

photo from high ground looking below with this wedge-shaped depth of field, the photograph

appears with the tilt-shift, miniature, or diorama effect. In fact, although it's called the tilt-shift

effect, shifting of the lens is not really used to achieve it. The good news is that you don't need

this special and expensive piece of equipment to create this tilt shift special effects.

Modern camera technology has moved on and you now have unprecedented freedom to create

photographs with these special effects. Technology has simplified everything so all you need is

a photo taken from a high ground overlooking a wide area and a wedge-shaped depth of field.

The simplest method to do this is to take the photos and upload them onto your computer with

Photoshop. You can then either manually apply the depth of field by selectively blurring certain

areas of the photos or use software plug-in to automatically do it for you.

The best camera is the one you always have with you. If you have a modern smart phone you

could even create these trick photography and special effects by downloading certain

applications dedicated to the tilt shift special effect. You take a photo, fire up the application to

digitally insert the special effects and then share it with the world.

Jim blogs about trick photography and special effects techniques, that people use to create stunning

photographs. You can sign up at his Trick Photography site to receive a free report on the top 10 trick

photography ideas for travel photos. Please feel free to share this document with your family and

friends if you think it’ll interest them, thanks!