Some photographers try to make miniatures look like the real world, while others aim to make the real world look like a miniature. “The Village” is a charming portrait of a tiny Portuguese town, made to look like a miniature via tilt-shift and time-lapse.

The Village (via Laughing Squid)

Photographer Lori Nix spends weeks and months creating extremely detailed miniature scenes — called dioramas — and then photographs them using an old fashioned 8×10 large format camera. This video offers a look at what goes on behind-the-scenes at Nix’s Brooklyn studio, and how she goes about creating her unique images. You see some of her photos in this post we published a year ago featuring her photography.

Lori Nix (via LaughingSquid)

Move aside Panasonic GF3, this is the world’s smallest Micro Four Thirds camera. Olympus took its Despicable Me-style shrink ray and reduced the Olympus E-PL1, E-P2, and E-PL2 to the size of an SD card for a promotion over in Hong Kong. They’re meant to be used as cute little cell phone charms, but they work nicely as tiny prop cameras for your action figures as well!
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When two photographers got engaged in Japan, they asked their jewelry-maker friend to create wedding rings based on the Leica 50mm Summilux lens. The groom’s ring was the focusing ring while the bride’s was the aperture ring. The friend also created a stunningly realistic miniature Leica M3 to hold the rings (they slide onto the lens)!

(via Tokyo Camera Style)

Update: Here are some new photos of the rings:

This one shows the scale of the mini M3 next to actual Leica cameras:

Using Lego pieces, Flickr user and Lego fan Larry Lars created an uber-accurate miniature version of his home photo studio. Maybe this could be a new method of creating lighting diagrams?
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Sam O’Hare is developing quite a reputation for his tilt-shift, miniature faking videos. O’Hare is the same guy that created The Sandpit, a beautiful tilt-shift video of New York City that has been watched nearly 2 million times. He was recently commissioned by the Coachella Music Festival to create a similar video for Coachella 2010, and the resulting video (shown above) is just as stunning.

It was created using the Nikon D3s, with 4 frames captured every second for the day shots and exposure times of up to 2 seconds per shot for night shots. Roughly 50,000 still images were captured, and the tilt-shift effect was added in post. There’s a pretty informative interview with O’Hare that discusses this new video here.

(via Laughing Squid)

Shukhrat of MINIMUS DESIGN created this time-lapse video of his favorite places in San Francisco, using a tilt-shift effect to make them look like miniature models. It reminds me of “The Sandpit“, a similar video done in New York City that went viral on the web back in February.

Thanks for the tip Stefan!

Here’s a fun idea: take famous landscape paintings and add a tilt-shift effect to them! This series of images was created by Artcyclopedia using famous Van Gogh paintings. We love how the selective focus gives the paintings a new dimension.
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Photojojo just added the “Mini Model Camera” to their store. This is a 1/6 scale miniature model DSLR system that actually allows you to swap the tiny lenses around. It’s definitely a cute and unique gift, but it comes at a no-so-miniature price — the 1.5 inch camera and three lenses are priced at $28.

There’s a price to pay for being able to brag about having the “compactest” camera among your friends.

Flickr user Florian (AKA f/28) creates and photographs 1:87 scale miniature sets carefully created by hand. The photographs featured here are from a set titled “No Country for Small Men“, with the title and scenes inspired by the movie “No Country for Old Men”. Everything was shot with a Canon 400D.
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