If there’s anything cooler than kids’ toys, it’s photographs of kids’ toys. Everyone loved looking down on their LEGO city or hordes of Micro Machines and I remember laying down to photograph my creations with a disposable camera from participant’s eye view.
Now that I’m “too old” to play with toys (never true – check my desk drawers) I’ve resorted to using Adobe Photoshop to re-create that feeling by giving photographs of real objects a Tilt Shift effect to make the focus of the pictures look like miniatures, which I’ll demonstrate in this simple tutorial.
Some people are never satisfied. Not content with visiting an amazing country and marrying his wife while there at Christmas, design-nerd James Brown set his camera up on the window-sill of his Kyoto hotel room and told it to take a photograph every thirty seconds.
It diligently did so, resulting in a fantastic time-lapse video (featuring a strangely mesmerising taxi-rank). Still not content, he added a tilt-shift effect to the video frame-by-frame and re-made it. The resulting video is fantastic, looks like a tiny toy city and is here for your viewing pleasure:
