Maybe I should not even write the post and let the title baffle the world. I can leave it to the GenAI comment spambots to derive meaning from that. No, there is a path here, though how it was traverse is the kind of stuff vectorized thinking would never get to.
In a group email, some folks I know were asked to share photos of landscapes. One person replied they were left out since they took many photos, but never landscapes. I tried to make a case like the DS106 Daily Create way of creating that responding with a literal interpretation was hardly required, that the best creating (to me) is often bending the rules.
Reaching for my own photos as examples, I thought the bits of play I had done with my old matchbox cars was a bit of faking landscape scenes (maybe)
Somehow that got me to thinking of the playing a long time ago with the style of tilt-shift photography, I remember doing back around 2009 when it was a fad done with an iPhone app like the featured image in the post (seeking who can identify the stadium and city first, @carpetbomberz is disqualified).
There was fun hadwith rendering detailed city shots into what looked like toy scenes. drive your toy Corvette with me across the Congress Avenue bridge into Austin.
I have to admit after reading the Wikipedia article on tilt-shift photography my fiddling with doing it in an app 15 years ago was a bit child play, the way it is done is a full photographic techniques with special lenses or calculated movement- it is both a rotation and a lateral sliding of the focus plane that is off kilter to the lens plane (I think). And also where I learn about the Scheimpflug principle
a description of the geometric relationship between the orientation of the plane of focus, the lens plane, and the image plane of an optical system (such as a camera) when the lens plane is not parallel to the image plane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle
The rabbit holes go deeper in that the Captain Theodor Scheimpflug, the person it is named after, actually was not the first to discover it, now I am learning about Stigler’s law of eponymy. Hold the link train, I better return.
I was looking at my meager tilt-shifting efforts (all in post) thinking I had done some with just editing on Photoshop, making a seletion mask with a large gradient/feathered edge, and applying gaussian blur outside with some saturation boost. The dare was on, could I redo them again the same way? I tried a fiew, before doing a bot of searching and getting reminded that PhotoShop has a built in tool under the Filter menu — Filter-> Blur gallery -> Tilt-Shift. Oi, I made it harder, maybe. I have a few examples I tried to do manually, they with the built in.
I tried to find source photos of either city photos or photos where there was much near and far detail. This was more fun to try than any claim of super prowess. And I can’t say for sure why this messing around needs a blog post given I have So Many Important Things to Write (note the invisible sarcasm tags).
Tilt-Shifting Manhattan
I thought of my recent post about Blog@Baruch where I saw reuse of my photo of Manhattan taken from the top floor of Baruch College. That photo had potential, maybe with the focus plane vertical around the Chrysler Building. Left to right is the original photo– College View flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license
I can barely tell the difference between my use of a mask and the blur effect, and the built in Photoshop one. Is this my John Henry triumph of man over machine? I can’t say either one really gets to that toy like effect in my older photos. Ir m aybe my technique is weak.
I go for a second example.
Tilt-Shifting Car Show in Moose Jaw
I thought my photo of Main Street Moose Jaw’s Show and Shine car show might work for Tilt-shifting the red car. That’s the original on the left Shiny Red Couger flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). For the second image, I made a selection of the car itself, expanded it by like 90 pixels and then feathered the selection 45 pixels before blurring the parts around the car. Using the built in filter, I could only use the band selection which is tilted, so the people on the left did not get the effect.
I have to admit not being too thrilled with eaither effort. It’s not getting quite the effect.
Tilt-Shifting The Curling Championship
I had a lot of optimism for my photo last year when Cori and I attended the 2025 World Men’s Curling Championship in Moose Jaw. The original photo looked like it had potential to select the arena floor. Again, on the left is the original Four On The Floor flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), followed by my effort to do it my memory. For the third one using the Photoshop Blut Gallery effet, I actually did to iterations, ince aligning the band with the long sides of the arena, and a second go using the bands somewhat aligned wth the shorter walls.
Maybe ths one gets closer to that toy-scene I remember doing previously.
In Conclusion
Well nothing really concluded, except that bit of joy when a memory triggers a bit of an associative trail journey of following a curiosity. (purely in the Vaneevar Bush variety (sorry Mike, your LLM ways do not sway me).
I can’t remember which iOS I used back in 2009, it could have been any of the ones listed in this old Digital Photography School article and I can in the app store a fleet of them, none really calling me to try again. This whole thing was more my own dare to see if I could redo what I did once before.
But at least now I have awareness of Captain Scheimpflug’s principle.
Featured Image: Camden Yards Tiltshifted flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
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