Vertigo Shot & Fake Miniatures

CS 194-26 Final Project

Nancy Li

Vertigo Shot

The vertigo shot, also called the dolly zoom, is a famous camera effect that was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in his movie "Vertigo." The effect is produced by taking several photographs of the same scene, with different zoom settings set so that the subject of the photo is the same size, while only the surroundings warp.

I borrowed a friend's Canon camera and took pictures of some inanimate indoor objects: a plant in a bathroom, and a teddy bear. To keep the camera steady, I shot these pictures from the floor and from a level counter. The most difficult part was eyeballing the subject at each shot to make sure it was about the same size! (You can see that the bear in the last image of the gif is slightly smaller than the others.)

Fake Miniatures

In this part we create fake miniature photo shots by simulating the Tilt Shift. We do this by masking a region of interest, and applying a blurring filter to the rest of the image, so that it narrows the perceived depth of field in the scene, and creates the illusion that the photo was taken really close to the subject.

I borrowed the same friend's Canon camera and took two photos to miniaturize - a chair outside of a cafe, and some trashcans on the streets of Berkeley. The other two photos (city of Rome and boats in a harbor) are from flickr. The user selects two boundary points, and the y coordinates are used to calculate a rectangular focus region. A series of 4 masks are used to make the final result image in 4 iterations.

At each iteration, the image region inside the mask is left unblurred and the rest of the image is blurred using a Gaussian filter. The mask size is increased, and is also passed through a Gaussian filter to make the blend more natural. The result is a fake miniature photo, where regions of the image farther away from the depth of field are more blur (these regions are repeatedly blurred). Finally the image's saturation is inceased to make the result more toy-like.

HTML/CSS for this page was taken from https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/card/