Recently, I have been attempting to learn a new photography technique. Well… actually, a post-processing technique.

A work colleague of mine makes a lot of models, and we though it would be interesting to try and make them to make then look life-sized or larger. I also stumbled across a photograph on the Nikon D300s Sample Images page by Ami Vitale of what looks like a scale model of Cairo. However, I believe it’s a life size image either with some blurring applied in post-processing or taken with a tilt-shift lens.

So, above, you can see a photo of a model diesel locomotive.

Actually, it’s not a model. It’s life-sized and was originally taken as part of the Nene Valley Railway Spring Diesel Gala photo gallery.

If you were not fooled by the above image, that’s probably because it’s my very first attempt at making something life-sized look miniature. It took me 1.5 hours to go from the original image (below) to the image you see above! 50% of that time, however was spent waiting for my laptop to access it’s swap file as I don’t have enough RAM to make continual edits like this!

The general technique for achieving the above is to reduce the depth of field drastically. I also increased the saturation to make it look a bit more like a painted model on a model railway.

The reason this technique is so difficult (in case you wondered!) is because you cannot get a depth of field shallow enough when you are so far away from the subject.

You can reduce the depth of field by either widening the aperture of your lens or by getting closer to the subject. When photographing scale models, for example, you are typically so close that the depth of field can be measured in low numbers of centimeters. When photographing a life-sized locomotive, though, you might be stood 5 to 10 metres away and as a result, the depth of field might now measured in tens of metres. Therefore, much more is in focus and the subject no longer looks miniature. You also cannot increase the aperture any further because even on lenses that go up to f1.8, that is still not large enough to reduce the depth of field enough to make the subject look miniature.

You can achieve a very similar effect by using a tilt-shift lens, but I believe they are quite expensive, don’t quite give the same end result, and I don’t have one anyway!

To counteract this, blurring must be applied in post-processing, but this is not as easy as you might think because the further away from the lens an item is, the more it must be blurred. Because photographs are 2-dimensional instead of 3-dimensional, the photo editing software has no way of knowing what is far away from the camera and what is very close – it just sees a rectangular bunch of colored pixels called a photograph. The blurring must therefore be applied in stages, manually.

I believe the Adobe Photoshop CS4 has a “Lens Blur” feature, but as I have not paid over over £600 for my photo editing software I must use Paint Shop Photo Pro X3‘s “Depth of Field” feature. I’ve no idea how these two features compare, but I suspect they are fairly similar in that they apply a gradient blur from inside to outside starting at the edges of the chosen area.

Anyway, my first attempt, as I mentioned, is above. Hopefully it fooled you enough!

Now onto the opposite – making miniature things look large!

Above is my first attempt at this technique. The main idea with this technique is to increase the depth of field until the subject looks life-sized. As the opposite of what I mentioned above, there are two ways to increase the depth of field. One method is to get further away from the subject and the other is to decrease the aperture size.

Obviously, getting further away from the subject is easy, but the problem then becomes the amount of zoom available. If the subject is really small and you are really far away, you need a lot of zoom to make it fill the frame again! Making the aperture small is also easy – my 300mm zoom lens goes down to f45, but even that is not small enough to keep everything in the shot in focus. Therefore, you must either bring everything in the shot within the still-small depth of field, or substitute the out-of-focus elements with in-focus elements manually in post-processing.

In the above example, I was easily able to get Tiny Clanger and the bonsai tree with its mud into focus, but the background was always out of focus. I therefore grabbed a photograph of a landscape in a glass picture frame and put it about 3 inches behind the subject. This kept everything in almost in focus, but also had the reflections on the glass picture frame visible along the top half of the trees.

In summary, it was a failure, but I don’t think it was bad for a first attempt.

Next, I wanted to try the technique on my work colleague’s models. The result can be seen below.

This model aircraft has a real-life wingspan of about 2 inches. The model was originally on a stand and was shot against the sky. I edited out the stand by cloning parts of the sky over the top of it, but found that the sky was still out of focus, even when using an f45 aperture size. I therefore took another photo of the sky separately, making sure it was in focus, and then substituted the out of focus sky for the in focus sky!

I think this technique works well!

The last thing to perfect is making models look life-sized when they are not shot against something as easily replaceable as the sky. I tried shooting some ground-based models on various surfaces, but none of them worked. The concrete looked like I had zoomed in, the blades of grass looked huge and the gravel also looked strange. All of these issues gave away the fact that the subject was actually miniature and I had zoomed in in order to take the photo. This is something I still need to sort out.

Anyway – I hope this helps someone out there attempting to learn this technique, and if anyone who has already perfected it has any tips, suggestions or other comments, please let me know! Feel free to leave a comment even if you know nothing about it at all as well, of course!

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