Fake Miniatures
Process
To create a line of focus I pick one point on my image by hand.Then depending on whether or not I am trying to make a vertical or horizontal line of focus I expand that point to a line of pixels corresponding with the given x or y value. Then I expand that line of focus into a box by including the line of pixels parallel to it on each side of it within a certain width argument that is given depending on how big the section I'm trying to miniaturize in the image is. I then take a copy of the image and blur it using a gaussian filter pyramid with an std of .5. Most of the time I do 7 iterations through the gaussian pyramid. I add back in the values of the unchanged focus box to its corresponding position in the blurred image. Last I use the PIL library in python to enhance the contrast and saturation of the image by 1.5.
Results
Adding in the enhanced color and saturation really went a long way towards increasing the toy miniature affect of the image. Images like the snow church, rainforest house, and bolt law look very good because the portion of the image we are trying to make miniature are part of a very clear vertical or horizontal plane. In addition to that, the greenery in the background of both bolt and the rainforest house make it very easy for the surroundings to blur effectively. The Unit 2 image really did not work well because of a variety of factors. The image was too dark, and the background was mostly sky, so not conducive to blurring effectively.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dolly Zoom
Process
For this I used my friends digital camera with a real zoom lense. I used my pool table to take the pictures on and a poker set case that I slide backwards to keep the vertical alignment of the camera consistent. I could have done a better job of keeping my image centered as I slightly messed up the horizontal alignment of some of my images during some of my movements.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bells and Whistles
I turned all my images into gifs which really exemplified the zoom effect. I also experimented with moving the object instead of the camera which I thought actually created a cleaner zoom in effect.
|
|
|
Summaries
I thought it was really intersting how altering saturation and blurring surroundings alters how your eye sees a certain portion of an image so much. With dolly zoom I thought it was intersting how there is such a visual difference between moving a camera and moving the object in Dolly Zoom.