A Day in the Life of New York City

The Sandpit is a beautiful short film by Sam O’Hare that shows New York City in miniature using a shallow depth-of-field. In an interview on Aero Film, O’Hare says,

It is shot on a Nikon D3 (and one shot on a D80), as a series of stills. I used my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8 lenses for all of these shots. Most were shot at 4fps in DX crop mode, which is the fastest the D3 could continuously write out to the memory card. The boats had slower frame rates, and the night shots used exposures up to two seconds each. […] I shot over 35,000 [stills].

I did some initial tests a while back using a rented 24mm tilt-shift lens, which is the standard way to do this. However, after my tests, I found it made much more sense to do this effect in post, rather than in camera […] The entire shoot was completed in 5 days and two evenings, during the hottest week of August 2009.

We found it interesting that the tilt-shift effect was faked (as was most of the movement of the camera).