Faking miniature photography
I remember looking at a photo once of a model van sitting amongst some hills. I remember thinking that it was an incredibly detailed model, and that surely it must have been built by a professional model-maker or someone who took their hobby incredibly seriously. And I remember being astonished when I discovered that it was in fact a real van, shot with a telephoto lens and then processed to look like a model.
Since then I’ve been fascinated with the idea of creating fake miniature shots, and I finally got round to giving it a go.
First, some theory: when taking a picture of a model or other small object the depth of field is often very narrow. That is, the range of distances within which objects are in focus is small. So the object you are focusing on will be sharp, but even objects immediately in front or behind will fall out of focus. For some reason we humans are aware of this, so we interpret narrow depth of field as being “miniature”.
You can fake miniature photography by taking a photo of a real-life scene, but heavily restricting the depth of field. This can be done with tilt-shift lenses, or post-production processing. Since I can’t afford a tilt-shift lens I went for the cheap (read “free”) option of using TiltShiftMaker.com.
Dundee from above
First I found a good vantage point that would let me look down on a scene – which increases the appearance of looking down onto a model. My vantage point was Dundee Law Hill, which has fantastic views across the city. I snapped a picture of the city from above, looking for an area with plenty of detail broadly on a horizontal axis. The image was processed slightly to improve the white balance (the colours were a little washed out in the original), but that’s all that has been done to this image.
So now that we’ve got a decent image to use, we move on to the fakery. I used the tools at www.tiltshiftmaker.com, but if you have the skills you can do this in Photoshop or other image editor of your choice. I don’t, so I went for the easy route!
TiltShiftMaker makes the whole process very easy: just upload the image you want to play with, and you can then adjust various settings such as which part of the image will be in focus, how quickly the focus will drop off, and by how much. There’s an option to view a small preview of your image until you’re happy with it and download the full size copy.
Dundee in miniature
Click image to see larger version
You may have to play with the settings a few times, or possibly experiment with different images, but after a while you’ll get a convincing “miniature” photo. Here’s my picture of a “model” of Dundee. Weird effect, isn’t it?
I’m pretty happy with my first attempt at miniature fakery, but I’d improve on this by seeking out a scene with detail much closer to the horizontal, and perhaps with some people in. This effect gets really weird when you start to introduce tiny people to the scene.
What about you? Have you tried this? Or has this inspired you to try? If you have any examples of fake miniatures you have taken post them in the comments for us all to see. We’d love to see how you’ve tackled this technique.
If you enjoyed reading this why not buy me a coffee?