The other morning I found myself on the rooftop of the Hitt Street parking garage at sunrise. It had been a long night of paper-writing and I decided to take a break before finishing it up and going to bed for a nap before class later that day.
While I’ve owned a tilt/shift lens since 2005 and have used it extensively for landscape and architectural photography, mostly for the Scheimpflug effect, but I have never before intentionally made use of the tilt function to distort my subject. Vince LaForet’s “tiny landscapes” inspired me to try my hand at the technique.
Of course, my first few attempts were utter failures because, while I was able to compose the image properly and could “see” my subjects transforming into “toys” in front of me, I then stopped down the aperture to get proper depth-of-field. Why not, I thought–that’s the way it’s done, right? Wrong.
More after the jump…
