Small is beautiful

I was alerted today to a video that I found just so cool, I just had to find out more, and share, so thanks scaryduck for the tip off.

Have you ever seen really great Macro photography? You know, pictures of really small stuff. You can tell it's small because the depth of field is short, so only part of the picture is in focus.

Kind of like what I've done below. Not the best examples, but they're mine so I can put them up without having to credit someone else.







Your brain knows these are small things because of the blurring in the foreground and background.

But can you trick your brain into thinking big things are small if what you're looking at is only focused centrally? Normal cameras don't do this. The last thing you would want if taking a nice scenery or crowd scene would be most of it being a blur.

You can get special lenses that will do this, or a bit of jiggery pokery in Photoshop can achieve the same effect with a bit of layer masking and lens blur.

I had a go myself with a picture I took in Venice looking down on St. Marks Square.

Not perfect, but a first attempt, and hopefully you get the impression that it could actually be a miniature model, not life sized. Probably turning up the colour saturation a bit might make the people look 'hand painted'. I'll tinker with some other pictures.



Now hold that thought, and have a look at some of the amazing pictures online that others have done.

And finally, check out Keith Loutits videos. He's taken the same principle and used time lapse photography to create some scenes that look like a Cravendale advert, but are real people, frame by frame by frame...


Mardi Gras from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Then check out his other stuff.

Fancy a go yourself but can't afford Photoshop?

Neither can I, so I use GIMP - it's free and does everything Potatoshop does.

You gotta love open access software developers