The Birth of a Pond video above was shot by photographer James Breen over a three week period as he watched a construction crew create a pond from scratch in the Fall of 2009. To be fair, he didn't catch the entire "birthing" process, the final scene was captured a year after the pond was completed (allowing it enough time to fill naturally) but the video is still quite mesmerizing to watch.
In their most recent "Pro Photographer, Cheap Camera" challenge, DigitalRev managed to get world-renowned, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet to participate. Known best, perhaps, for his tilt-shift work, Laforet was asked to trade in his 1D X and 45mm tilt-shift lens for a Canon A2e and Lensbaby composer.
Freelensing. It’s been around for a while. It’s essentially the “poor man’s tilt shift.” All the technique requires is disconnecting a lens from the camera body and floating it around in front of your sensor to shift the focal plane in weird directions. It takes practice to get accurate with it, but overall the technique is pretty straightforward.
I wanted to take it a bit further.
Watch out Lensbaby. A recently published Olympus patent (No. 2012-199834) suggests that the Japanese camera company may be developing a selective-focus tilt lens of its own. The patent describes a technique for compensating for the "color shift" and image degradation that occur when using a tilt lens.
"Entry level" is a huge theme in the photo gear industry this year, and it's not limited to cameras. Lensbaby has also joined in on the action by announcing its new Spark lens. It's stripped-down plastic version of the company's selective focus lenses, allowing you to shoot fun "tilt-shift"-style photos without breaking the bank.
Vancouver-based photographer Eszter Burghardt creates miniature landscapes using food (e.g. seeds, powders, milk) and wool, and then photographs them using a shallow depth of field. Her images show everything from volcanos to icebergs. The projects are titled "Edible Vistas" and "Wooly Sagas".
The annual Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is considered to be the …
Photography enthusiast Maciej Pietuszynski jumped into tilt-shift photography recently by building a do-it-yourself …
Flickr user Alex12Ga turned his Canon 5D Mark II into a DIY digital view camera by mounting a Novar-Anastigmat 75mm f/3.5 lens from 1949 with its original bellows. He mounted the bellows to his camera using an aluminum plate and an EOS mount ring that he salvaged from a broken Sigma lens.
Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle -- the one that printed a photo with a cremated dog -- has a creative project called "Big Money" in which they made a giant 20:1 replica of a 50 cent Euro coin. They then placed the coin next to large objects and photographed them together, making the objects look like tiny toy replicas.
Local TV station WGN made this beautiful tilt-shift time-lapse video of Chicago, giving …
Pre-med student Ryan Killackey and his wife spent nearly two years shooting 10,000 …
Some photographers try to make miniatures look like the real world, while others aim to make the …
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.
When Jon Martin found an old Kodak Ektar 101mm f4.5 lens from the 1940's at work, he decided to try it on his D700 by freelensing to testing and see if it was compatible. After finding that it was, he began on building a rig to use it as a tilt-shift lens. He ended up building a rig using old camera gear and some custom wood parts.
Shukhrat of MINIMUS DESIGN created this time-lapse video of his favorite places in …
Remember the 102-year-old lens experiment we shared a week ago? Daire Quinlan did something similar -- he combined his grandfather's 6x9 Pocket Kodak lens from 1920 (90 years ago) with homemade bellows to create his own tilt-shift lens to play with. Unlike Timur Civan, who used his 102-year-old lens on a 5D Mark II, Quinlan used his frankenlens with a Nikon film camera.
Lensbaby unveiled a new accessory at Photokina called the Tilt Transformer, which allows you to use Nikon mount lenses on EVIL camera bodies as an instant tilt-shift lens with twice the tilt of normal TS lenses. It's currently available for Micro Four Thirds bodies, but will be available for Sony NEX cameras as well starting on October 28, 2010. The Tilt Transformer comes with the Lensbaby Composer in a $350 package, or separately for $250.
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.
Here’s a fun little tilt-shift, time-lapse video by The Bitter*Girls showing a sumo …
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,