Tilt-shift photos of Geauga Lake and SFMM

Sorry, if this has come up before:
I came across those funny tilt-shift photos, which make normal motives look like scale-models.
The picture of Geauga Lake is astounding. You have to look really close to see that its actually real and not a Faller model display.

Click here!

Make sure to click on the pics to make them bigger. *** Edited 2/14/2008 7:29:43 PM UTC by tricktrack***

The neat thing is that you don't really need a special lens for this. You can do it in Photoshop, of course!

http://recedinghairline.co.uk/tutorials/fakemodel/

Yes, I should have mentioned that its called "fake tilt-shift", but the linked article does this too. I´d gues that it would be very tricky to get a good result if you do it with a real lense.

It appears that in the Geauga Lake one, after the tree line, the background was replaced with a fake block wall adding to the illusion that it's a model in a dank basement somewhere.

I think that's why that one looks so damn good compared to the others.

Yah, that one was pretty amazing. I think they could have even gotten away with decreasing the blur mask towards the bottom. Cool stuff!

The Geauge Lake example seems to have been done with a sligthly more complicated process - e.g. the trees are in focus, while the coasters behind them out of focus.

That one must have been done using different masks to treat each level of depth separately (and also to add the brick wall in the back).

The world is just too full of great ideas...

Thanks for posting this!

Yeah, now that you mention it, it's not the simple mask technique described.

They hand traced the middle areas and simulated the DOF much more realistically at the expense of taking a bit more time than the gradient mask.

Ok, so I just had to try this myself. I messed with some Kings Island photos (because who doesn't have shots from the top of the Eiffel Tower) with varying results:

• Racer Station
• Italian Job
• Zephyr
• Fountains/Front Of Park
• Festhaus

Wow, Gonchar: Your photos are great! How long did it take you to do them?

Your pics have already been acknowledged on the blog. There is also a link to a tutorial which explains the "making of" of the Gauga Lake picture.

Click this.

Awesome Gonch. This is one of those things I've always wanted to do, but never remember when I have spare time.

Well done, Gonch.

For someone who's easily impressed by shiny metal objects, this is some really impressive stuff. Nice work, Gonch- what you did with the Racer's station is on par with the Geauga Lake photo. It looks so... plasticky.

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tricktrack said:
Wow, Gonchar: Your photos are great! How long did it take you to do them?

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Surprisingly, not long at all.

If you follow the simple technique in the page Jeff linked to (and the original article did too) - it's actually a pretty thoughtless process. Just a couple of steps.

I'm really most amazed at how such a simple thing can trick the brain so easily.

Nice work, Gonch.

If you want to do something similar to that in-camera then you might try Lens Babies (http://www.lensbabies.com) for SLR cameras. They allow a movable spot of focus within the frame.

That Italian Job almost makes me wish I were a tiny plastic person so I could go ride it.

I've considered a Lensbaby many times, FF, I just can't commit to buying one. I'm not sure how much I'd actually use it.

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Lord Gonchar said:
I'm really most amazed at how such a simple thing can trick the brain so easily.

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Yeah, thats really amazing. As somenone who is not really interested in model building and all that stuff, its just strange that everyone immidiately thinks that these are scale models. Where does this rememberance come from?
Would it work for someone who never saw a model picture before?

Dammit Gonch...just when I thought you couldn't possibly be any sexier you show off your fake tilt-shift skills! Nice work indeed :)

^^
I think it somehow refers to the way we see small things in real life -
I guess that if we look at really small things, the depth-range of the focus of our own eyes works out in a similar way, probably - even though we hardly ever perceive it consciously.
It's kind of interesting - it means that the depth-of-field of our eyes is used as an indicator of the size of objects by our vision system.
It's definitely an illusion that could interest cognitive psychologists.

P.S. The pics you made look really cool, L.G. - I'm sure you must have a massive collection of suitable images :) *** Edited 2/16/2008 1:54:55 AM UTC by superman***

Is it possible to take the models of the Hard Rock Theme Park and make the models look real? ;)