As I have been looking at large spaces and places where people will gather, I thought I should look at miniature photography, although I probably won’t use this technique within my own photos, I may be able to learn something that will improve the quality of my images and my project.
Tilt–shift photography is the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene.
This kind of photography is quite intriguing, because there are some images where is difficult to tell if the image is of a real life scene or a model.
An artist named Serena Malyon took a very different approach to tilt-shift photography, taking paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and editing them through photoshop to create this tilt-shift affect. I think these images are a really good example of how this effect can really change an image and the way the viewer looks at them. This also forces the viewer to look at certain details more than others, and actually prevents other bits of the image to be seen clearly.
Some photographers go to great lengths to make effective tilt-shift images, for example, the art design group Skrekkogle made a giant 50 cents, with the scale 20:1, to make other objects look small. I quite like this idea, because rather than photographing whole models, or real life, they’ve decided to mix the two to make the images even more confusing for viewers.
Olivio Barbieri mentioned that this kind of photography is good for showing off impressive structures, without all the business of crowds and it allows you to see the big picture without having to see the whole story.
“I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything,” Barbieri says. “After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.”
Although I don’t think I will be using this style of photography within my project, I may try to experiment with it on a couple of images as I really like the effect, and it could add a different angle to my photo book.