Is it real, or is it a model?

The answer is yes, that’s a photo of real people on a real campground (thanks to my wife, my sister and her fiancé). This is a technique called “tilt-shifting” that’s normally done with the lens of a camera. This came about as a way to solve the problem of having converging lines of buildings and objects in photos (much like the one, two, or three-point perspective often used for illustrations). However, as a by-product, using this technique also makes any birds-eye perspective of a landscape appear as a highly detailed model.

There’s a Swiss photgrapher in California by the name of Gérard Pétremand who has some phenomenal examples of this technique. There’s also Olivo Barbieri who has made a name for himself in doing the same thing.

One can purchase a lens from Canon for about $1,000. Their lenses will render this technique for any camera that it will fit. I picked up on Nori Ravi’s review of the Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8 Tilt Shift Lens that allowed her to take some exceptional pictures of flowers. However, if you’re on a budget there’s a $100 option from Lensbabies that would probably work pretty well too. Yet you can do it much less expensively if you’re a do-it-yourselfer and feel like doing some hardware hacking.

The last and probably cheapest option (if you already own Photoshop) is, well, using Photoshop. At the beginning of this year, a growing community on boingboing and flickr showcase their own experiments. Some of them are down-right good.

The Photoshop tutorial is surprisingly easy. I had it figured out pretty quickly. As someone who dabbles in photography on the side (way on the side), I feel that this presents a new perspective (pardon the pun) and injects a new sense of creativity in my hobby.