Small Planet - Creating a miniature effect

When I was in Japan last year, I had a chance to meet a great friend of mine (and fantastic photographer), Tommy Oshima. Tommy gave me a book called "Small Planet" by Naoki Honjo. It is a book of normal scenes of cityscapes, streets, etc - shot from a long distance with specialised equipment to make the scenes look like toy models. It's interesting how the eye / mind is tricked into believing these real scenes are miniaturized cities and opens the door to many potential interpretations about the world being a small place, and so forth.

Below is the cover image from this great book which gives you an idea of the effect I'm talking about.

Small Planet by Naoki Honjo

When I got back from Japan, I decided to give it a go myself. Here was my first attempt (click to enlarge):

Toy Town, by Lawrence Ripsher (click for larger version)

Now, this was a bit of a quick and dirty example and as I am writing this, I'm actually sitting on the 20th floor of a hotel in Asia. So, while watching the world go by on the street below, I decided to take a few shots and give this another try. I also thought it would be interesting to explain how this effect is achieved.

There are three ways:

The Tilt Shift Lens
This is the correct way to do this and it's how Honjo (along with a few other photographers) does it. If you shoot with a DSLR, you can purchase a Tilt Shift lens. These lenses are normally reserver for architecture, landscape or product shots. They allow you to tilt the focal plane of the lens to allow a building shot to be more accurate, or against a macro / product shot to allow for larger apertures without a shallow depth of field. However, if you use these lenses in the opposite way to which they were originally intended, they create ultra shallow depths of field.

It is this effect that tricks the eye.

You see, when you look at a picture of a landscape, you expect it to all be in focus. However, when you see a macro image, your eye naturally expects the depth of field to be much more shallow. So - combine these two effects - an ultra shallow depth of field on a landscape style picture, and your brain is tricked into thinking it's a macro. Or in other words, the only logical thing that could be in the macro - a model.

Now, it takes more than just buying a tilt shift... You have to invest time / effort, find interesting scenes and work hard on getting the depth of field 'believable'. You also have to include other aspects such as shooting from the right angle and so forth.

I've never actually invested in this type of equipment so have not tried it. But have seen it used with excellent effect.

So, then what's the alternative?

Shooting through a plane window
Well, this is one way to do it - but it's not really an alternative as it's too impractical. But it is possible to achieve by shooting through the window of a plane. If you shoot through the window at a low altitude with a long enough lens - you can get the model effect. The trick is to aim at your subject through a clear part of the glass, and use the natural distortion / dirt / thickness to cover the rest of the image. What you can be left with is a similar looking effect. Here's one I took flying over London in a 747. It was shot with a D200 and 18-200 VR lens. No zooming / cropping / photoshop (other than levels) has been applied to the image.

"Extravagance", by Lawrence Ripsher (click for larger version)

So if the first method is expensive, and the second is impractical (and expensive), what's the cheap / practical alternative?

The Photoshop Approach
If you don't have a tilt shift lens (or a private jet :), you can actually achieve a remarkably similar effect through Photoshop. Here's how you do it, followed by a few samples at the end with my compact ultra-zoom.

Step 1 - First of all, you need to find a scene where you can get up high, zoom to a sufficient level and take an image of something below you, at around 45 degrees.
Step 2 - Once you've done that. Open the image in photoshop and press Q to go into Quick Mask mode
Step 3 - Once in quick mask mode, select the Gradient tool from the toolbars and drag it across the screen. You want to start just beyond your subject and drag it in the opposite direction for about an inch. What you'll see is that about half the screen turns red while the other half remains normal colour. An example can be seen below (click to enlarge)

Step 4 - Press Q again to exit Quick Mask mode. A selection triangle will appear on the screen - this is the bounding box we're about to apply a blur filter too (to confirm, this triangle should not cover your subject)
Step 5 - Go to Filter -> Blur -> Lens Blur
Step 6 - Enter some values. I usually just change the Radius and Blade Curvature. For example, for a 7MP image you might use values 40 and 40 respectively. Apply the filter
Step 7 - Repeat steps 2 to 6 on other side of the subject so that you're blurring the majority of the image
Step 8 - Resize for web
Step 9 - Apply an Unsharp mask

And that's it! How does it look? Well, here are some examples taken today from my hotel room from the 20th floor, with an Olympus SP-550 compact ultrazoom. It depends on how much time you spend getting the photoshop correct (I'm lazy and so rushed mine a little) but with some effort and the right image, the effect is great. As with all Optics vs Processing alternatives, the tilt / shift method is going to give a more realistic / graceful gradient of depth of field. But if you're not in the market for one and want to give this a go (or just want to see what it looks like), this article is a step in that direction.

Click on images to view a larger version.

Comments

[Craig Persel]

Thanks for the detailed tips and procedures! As you probably remember I've created some of these minature images myself (pbase "minature world"), but used a completely different ... and have to say amateur ... method. Your PS method is much better. Thanks!

[Chuck]

Is this the Lawrence I know? What an unexpected suprise to find a mini-PS tutorial on the blog. Well done. I really like this effect. It's too bad I didn't think of it first because now I would be a copycat if I do it. I am secretly hoping that you are going to do a project with this technique. I think it would be interesting.

Anyway, another great photographer who uses the tilt-shift lens technique in a subtle way is David Hilliard. He's got a great book available over at Aperture.org. Here's a link with the cover image:
http://www.aperture.org/store/books-detail-w.aspx?ID=434

[Christina Conroy]

I like the third of the ones you did today the best. I think it gets the DOF the most "correct" at least in terms of what you would see from a macro shot.

This is a cool effect that I've seen before and thought had a different purpose. (I've even seen your mall shot before and thought it was for a different purpose.) I like not only how it makes the landscape look toyish, but how it really isolates your subject in a very interesting way.

Thanks for sharing! It means a lot!

[jude]

Fantastic.. I appreciate the tutoral on it as I need step by step instructions to "get" anything..

Now to find my way to a high perch ;)

[etty]

Jude, try to search for detailed lessons at http://file.sh . There sure to be some ;)