Final Project 1 - Vertigo Shot

The goal of this project is to duplicate the dolly zoom. To achieve this, we can take a series of pictures of an object. Each time we take a picture of the object, we take a step backward, but zoom in so that the object has the same size on the picture. By doing so, the perspective of the background changes while the subject stays the same size.

The process

To complete this project, I used the camera from my iPhone. The resolution of the images have increased significantly since the directions for the project were written (2010), so the results actually look pretty decent. I chose household objects with a variety of objects in the background so that the effect of the dolly zoom would be more apparent. Every time I took a picture, I took a step back and zoomed in on the object. The hardest part was keeping the object approximately the same size in all of the images. I turned on the "grid" setting so that I could the align the object in each picture.

Shooting the Pictures

Here is the first sequence of the pictures that I've taken for the purposes of this project.

Here is the second sequence of the pictures that I've taken for the purposes of this project.

Bells and Whistles

Now that the pictures have been taken, we can compile the images into a gif.

Final Project 2 - Fake Miniatures

The goal of this second project is to create the "Tilt Shift" effect. To do this, the user can select a focus plane, and then blur the rest of the image. By doing so, it makes it look like the objects in the focus plane are really close to the object.

The process is as follows. First, the user some selects some focus plane. A mask is placed over the plane, and the rest of the image is blurred using a Gaussian filter. Next, the mask is increased in size, and the rest of the miage is blurred again using a Gaussian filter. We repeatedly increase the size of the mask until the entire image is covered. This works because repeatedly convolving the Gaussian filter with part of the image causes a blurrier result.

For example, for this given image, the user may choose to make everything in the same horizontal line as the house as the focus the plane. The mask will look like this:

The Gaussian filter is then applied to the rest of the image. We then increase the mask size, apply the Gaussian filter to the rest of the image, and so on:

Here is the tilt shift effect applied on some images I found online. The first image is from here , and the second image is from here.

Original Image	With Tilt Shift Effect

Here is the tilt shift effect applied on some of my own images.

Original Image	With Tilt Shift Effect