In this part, I explore creating fake miniatures by simulating tilt-shift photography. The idea is that by narrowing the perceived depth of field in the scene we can creates the illusion that the lens was really close to the subject. This can be done by selecting a focus plane, defining the depth of focus and increasingly blurring the image around the focus plane to achieve depth of field effect.
To define the focus line, I wrote a program using ginput to select two points on the image. Then I calculate the line that passes through the two points as the focus line. The focus line can be any linear line on the image.
I wrote a function to define the DOF as a rectangle around the focus line with the size determined by a parameter.
Blurring of the image is achieved by creating a mask according to the DOF to keep the image region inside DOF unblurred and blurring the rest of the image using a gaussian filter. For a natural blend, the mask is also passed through a gaussian filter. Since regions of the image further away from the DOF should have more blur, I repeatedly blur the image while increasing the masked region.
Since minatures and toys usually have bright and vibrant colors, to achieve more realistic fake miniatures, the saturation of the final blurred image is increased by a factor given as a parameter.
The first two images are from the internet and the rest are taken by myself.
In this part, I attempt to simulate the famous in-camera effect, "the dolly zoom", or the vertigo shot. To duplicate this effect, I take a sequence of photos with the subject at the same position in the image, changing the FOV as I change the distance between the subject and the camera.
I used a tripod and changed the settings on my camera to show grids on the display to minimize the difference in the position and size of the subject in the photos. However, since I have to move the camera or subject, the subject will still appear differently in each photo. And I also couldn't make the exposure of each photo in a sequence exactly the same.
I tried different combinations of moving the subject and camera, such as keeping the subject still while moving the camera and moving the subject while keeping the camera still. I also explored increasing and decreasing the distance between the subject and the camera.
Just by looking at the photos in a sequence, I find that the photos look almost all the same unless I really focus on the background. So for better effects, I assembled the photos into GIFs.
In this sequence, the subject is kept still while the camera is moved closer to the subject and the FOV is decreased.
In this sequence, the subject is kept still while the camera is move away from the subject and the FOV is increased.
In this sequence, the camera is kept still while the subject is move closer to the camera and the FOV is decreased.
Since the subject is moved, the distance from the subject to background objects actually changed, so the zoomming effect is magnified.
In this sequence, the subject is kept still while the camera is moved away from the subject and the FOV is increased.
The dolly zoom effect in this sequence is not so prominent, probably because the background is rather flat and generally at a distance with the subject, so the change of FOV is hard to see. Also, it was hard to make the chair the same size and at the same position in the photos, so the GIF didn't turn out very well.