My first Tilt-Shift photo

My good pal Gregor has been posting a series of Fake Tilt-Shift photographs and I’ve been dying to try it out myself. Wikipedia describes Tilt-Shift faking as:

Tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature scale model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is.

I recently acquired a new Canon 55mm-250mm IS lens for my 400D and with new lens in hand I was able to take some cool shots from our balcony at work.

I took a number of different shots and then tried to follow this online tilt-shift tutorial to create my first masterpiece but the results were not fantastic. I was not happy with the output as it didn’t seem to create the miniature effect I was hoping for.

So, I created my own selection band by manually selecting the road, carefully following the natural curve and shadows, as well as other elements like the flags and robots to give it more precision. It literally took me hours to do but I am more than happy with the output.