Fake Miniatures: Tilt-shift Photography

Overview

The goal is to make full-sized scene images resemble miniature models by applying Gaussian filter on each side of a selected focus line. This creates the effect of shallow depth of field, with only one plane in focus and the rest of the image increasingly blurred based on pixel distance away from the focus line.

Implementation

1. Select 1 point as center of focus line
2. Specify depth of field (DOF) as area to keep the original image
3. Split the image into RGB color channels
4. For each channel, recursively apply Gaussian blur to sections above and below DOF area
5. Stack RGB channels into resulting image and increase saturation to enhance the miniature effect

Results

Image from the project spec

Pictures I took in New York

Images from Flickr by Taiwan Scene Gallery

Vertigo Shot: Dolly Zoom Technique

Overview

This disorienting effect is created by increasing zoom on the camera while moving away from the subject. The result is that the subject is a constant position and size but the background gets larger. I used a Canon EOS Rebel T6 DSLR with EF-S18-55mm zoom lens.

The main difficulty I encountered was keeping the subject of the camera in the relative same position between images while changing the distance from the subject, since I didn't have a tripod. The cleanest result was the shot of the coffee cup where I positioned the camera on my phone and slid it on a table.

Results

Philz coffee

Resulting gif

Outside VLSB

With the coffee as a closer subject, the vertigo zoom effect resulted in a perspective shift to a frontal view of the cup, which isn't noticeable in the VLSB gif. Both gifs use images with increasing distance from (thus increasing zoom on) the subject, creating the effect of moving into the background.

Bells & Whistles
In the results below, I reordered the images to create gifs comparing increasing zoom (moving away from the subject) and decreasing zoom (moving toward the subject, which shows more of the background).

Waterbottle outside Li Ka Shing

Cool wall downtown