Minifakes

[nikkortorokkor]

Has anybody else seen the minifakes or fake tilt shifts that have appeared on Flickr?

As a dedicated consumer of model railway magazines in my misspent youth, I'm smitten by these "is it or isn't it?" PS masterpieces.

This would be one of my favourites:

www.flickr.com/photos/lynt/2398609040/sizes/l/

Who would have thought of trying for this effect? Not me, but some people are so durned creative!

[Randy]

I saw these a couple years ago, it's funny what keeps people fascinated, eh?

[mickeyobe]

Michael.

I am puzzled by the extraordinarily shallow depth of field.
In real life, even with a very long telephoto, I thing the depth of field would be considerably greater.
Is there a reason for this?

Mickey

[Deleted]

Mickey:

I was thinking the same thing. The lack of depth of field takes away from the realism. If you take a photo of a real street scene most of it will be in focus, not matter what the f-stop.

Wayne

[PeterW]

I've no idea who was the author of this pic. Sorry if I tread on his/her toes but I'll be blunt about it.

It seems to be an attempt to take a street scene and make it look like a picture of a model roadway layout taken with an indifferent camera using an aperture far wider than the lens warrants. Why anyone should want to do this I have no idea, but it doesn't come off.

You can almost trace out the area that's been picked out by a lassoo in PS or a similar program, and the background blurred. As such it isn't very well done. The plane of sharp focus isn't consistent, and the blurring is the same all over instead of varying with distance.

All in all, a pretty poor attempt to ape what would have been a poor original.

OOH, I can get knives out at times, but this one belongs in the trash bin.

PeterW

[Deleted]

Peter:

You need to quit holding things in and say what you really mean.

[nikkortorokkor]

Wayne & Mickey,

I think Peter has answered your questions, even if in a way that wasn't very complimentary to the photograph. These aren't miniatures, but "real" scenes fiddled with so that they look like miniatures - & not very well done in Peter's opinion!
Randy, It kept me fascinated for an hour or two, until I worked out how to do it, then the interest palled. But the general fascination itself is interesting - "fake tilt shift" now receive a lot of views on Flickr. I think the secret might lie in Peter's criticism. The effect should not be too good. Like satire, if people can't see through it, it looses its effectivenesses.
viva la difference!

[Deleted]

Interesting. I thought they were photographs of miniatures--and not very good ones at that! Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I can't see the "why."

[mickeyobe]

Peter,

Please sheath your blade for a moment.
I have no better explanation and therefore must agree with you.
But ...
1. as someone who lives in a city where streetcars (trolleys) have always been a way of life, I have yet to see even lightly used trolley (streetcar) tracks that were not shiny. They also gleam at night from street and vehicle lights.
2. the lighting seems peculiar. It appears to be coming from all directions and casts no distinct shadows.

Okay. You may bare your steel and have at me.

Mickey

[PeterW]

Okay. You may bare your steel and have at me.

Wouldn't dream of it, Mickey. You might riposte!

Haven't got an answer about the non-shiny tracks. The main reason I went for a genuine street scene was the people on the right. I've yet to see people as realistic as this on a model roadway or railway layout.

Also the flat lighting suggests an actual scene - possibly lightly overcast, though there appears to be sunlight from the right in the background so maybe the main foreground was in the shadow of buildings? However well a large model layout is lit I find you still get shadows, sometimes conflicting if there are several main lights in an exhibition hall.

PeterW

[nikkortorokkor]

Jun 10, 2008 12:23:05 GMT -5 PeterW said:

Okay. You may bare your steel and have at me.

Also the flat lighting suggests an actual scene - possibly lightly overcast, though there appears to be sunlight from the right in the background so maybe the main foreground was in the shadow of buildings? However well a large model layout is lit I find you still get shadows, sometimes conflicting if there are several main lights in an exhibition hall.

PeterW

Peter, I won't bang on about this, since no one here actually sees the point of wasting all that time in PS (*sigh* you're just not post modern enough - which is a compliment really) but you've highlighted the biggest problem facing the photographer trying to make a Hong Kong Tram look like a toy. For fake tilt shift to look real (unreal?) you need strong light and high contrast, to replicate hard indoor lighting. Shiny surfaces also add considerably to the effect. In Hong Kong, haze & increasingly, these days, pollution makes for very diffused light. I remember standing on the edge of Kowloon a couple of years back and barely being able to make out the towers across the harbour. I believe things have got even worse in the intervening half decade.

[mickeyobe]

Peter,

I concede.
Your arguments are very convincing and sooo logical.

But I am still troubled.
1. The figures are, indeed realistic and being on such narrow bases as their two feet would probably topple over if they were models. Unless they were glued into position.
2. For such a busy intersection it is extraordinarily free of litter.
3. There are no overhead wires for the streetcars or anything else.
4. And there is still that persistent question "Why would someone do this?"

On the other hand;
1. The worn traffic instructions painted on the road are very true to life as are
2. The shrubs and particularly what appears to possibly be a rhododendron hedge.

Mickey

[paulatukcamera]

To stop you lot from assaulting each other:

My conclusion - its not Photo Shop!

I am certain it is one of them new fangled "roly poly" lenses!

camerahobby.com/Review-LensBaby.htm

Paul

[nikkortorokkor]

OK., I'll admit that in the interest of science, I tried fake tilt shift myself using the Gimp.

Peter, before you point out all the shortcomings, I see most of them myself. The patch of under-blurred rails to the right of the engines is particularly distracting, but my interest has, frankly, waned too much for me to waste more time smudging it.

For those who ask why, well, its funny, but that's exactly what my wife says when another old camera arrives.


Southern Cross Station, Melbourne, Australia.


The Original

So, fake tilt shifts aren't models and they aren't produced by lens babies or other lomo-like contraptions - just by geeks with too much time on their hands.

[PeterW]

Michael,

I like your try better than the Hong Kong tram. I won't critique it because you say you can see the most obvious faults.

It's far from easy to try to fake a scene to make it look as if it were taken with lens shift and/or lens swing/tilt or back swing/tilt. You have to have a very clear idea of what camera movements do and what the scene should look like before you can fake it.

Finding the plane of sharp focus, and keeping it consistent, is the most difficult. There's far more to it than just depth of field. Swings, tilts and shifts are most easily understood if you read up about the Scheimpflug relationship (the relationship between the positions and relative angles of the lens and film plane). Google for Scheimpflug, there's lots of info about it. Then, if possible, spend a couple of hours with a technical 5x4 camera that has all the movements applying the theory and trying out the relationship on the ground glass screen.

Unfortunately such cameras are rather expensive. I haven't got one, though a couple of my Victorian plate cameras have limited movements.

When John was taking his photography degree he spent his work experience time in a London advertising studio. Before he went there he borrowed a 5x4 technical camera from the college and we both spent an instructive Sunday afternoon exploring what it could do - and used up several packs of expensive 5x4 Polaroid transparency film doing it!

If nothing else it gave us both an extra interest when looking at the professional pictures of layouts in various model railway magazines, as well as in mail order catalogues and adverts. In those days the photographer was more important than the Photoshop expert. Nowadays the roles seem to be reversed.

Not many lenses these days have the covering power to cope with shifts; you run outside their circle of sharp focus. This is one reason why people who still like to use large format cameras with movements (often 5x4 or whole plate - 8.5x6.5 inches) value good quality older lenses made to cover a 10x8 inch plate.

Years ago there used to be a 35mm technical camera, the beauty of it being that you could use cheap film and (relatively) inexpensive lenses and shutters from medium format camera and still use the movements. I think it died because many magazines in those days wouldn't look at colour transparencies smaller than 6x6. Most of them wanted 5x4 inch for covers. (I have a story about that, but this post is getting too long).

I'm no longer into model trains, but since this thread started I looked through a couple of recent issues of model train magazines in my local newsagent. The pictures were good, but most seemed to have been taken with a 'straight' digital SLR well stopped down. They didn't seem to have quite the quality of pictures in the old mags of the 1960s when pros had a 5x4 technical camera, and knew how to use it.

PeterW