Shari Baker | Visual Artist

An ongoing fascination of mine has been illusion and trickery through the medium of photography and video - essentially, time-based mediums - I'm constantly intrigued by how using a few simple tools, one can trick the human mind into seeing something other than reality.

I wanted to know what lay at the root of the phenomena, as well as explore the actual technique.

What makes the brain believe, when viewing an image created of a real life scene, captured using a tilt-shift lens, that it is looking at a miniature model of the scene, and not real life at all?

The term “tilt-shift photography” refers to the method of tilting the camera lens to distort the plane of focus and shifting the lens to distort the perspective. Today, most photographers simply take a digital photograph and apply the tilt-shift distortions via software.

Aerial views of cities are well-suited to tilt-shift photography. The blurring at the edges of the photograph simulates the effect of a macro lens on a much smaller field. Hence, this tricks our brains into believing that we are actually viewing a macro image of a small 'toy town'. Toy towns using the magic of tilt-shift photography!

One of the most difficult aspects of tilt-shift photography is finding the right conditions. The lighting has to be bright and full in order to turn out a convincing finished photo because those are the lighting conditions one would expect to find with a photograph of a true miniature.

The subject matter is just as important as the angle and lighting in tilt-shift photography. If a subject is too complicated or detailed, it isn’t believable as a model. But if it’s too plain, it is difficult to notice the changed perspective.

Using a combination of tilt-shift and time-lapse photography, one can create enchanting Lilliputian worlds where itty-bitty people go about enjoying their leisure time and everyday scenes become detailed little models, a stop-motion animation.

A charming way to get people to take a second look at their surroundings and notice things that they may not ordinarily pay attention to.

Always fascinated with the relationship between time, light and motion in photographic domain, and the ability to trick the human brain into seeing something other than reality, I began explorations in the process of creating tilt-shift imaging, both stills and video.

This is an ongoing fascination which recently came back into focus through some discussion about technique with Martin Ainsworth.