Free-Choice: Tilt-shift/selective blur

My assignment to myself was to experiment with selective blur, especially in the context of creating false miniature photos.  I’ve seen pictures of them online, and always wanted to learn how to do it myself.  The challenge for me here was finding out how to edit photographs in photoshop so that I could create this effect.  The way that tilt-shift photography works is that in creating blur on both sides of the photo, it mimics a shallow depth of field that makes things appear to be far smaller than they are.  It was really cool to learn about the different tools photoshop had that I’ve never used before, but will be incredibly useful in the future.  I had to figure out how to use them myself, and so it was challenging, but much simpler once I learned.

The biggest impact of this assignment was teaching myself even more about photoshop.  I learned how to use quickmask with the gradient tool, which creates a gradient that functions as a layer mask; I learned how to use different types of blur – guassian is my favorite, but lens blur and box blur also create an interesting effect; and I learned how to use the history brush, which undos certain edits to a photo.  I also found out what, exactly, tilt-shift photography is and how it works.  I’d seen it before, but I couldn’t figure out what made it look the way it did.  Since starting this, I’ve put together how it works and, possibly, how to do it without the use of photoshop in the future.  If I can create a shallow enough depth of field, I may be able to create photographs like this on my own, using just my camera.  I plan to experiment with it more in the future.  Another thing I learned is how to create a fals focus, and how to best choose a subject of a photograph through blur.  In this case, I had to carefully select my photographs, looking specifically for ones that were looking down and had a fairly interesting composition.  As a result, this project gave me an even better understanding of photo composition and how it relates the the type of photography one is doing.