tilt-shift

The “real photos that look fake” post was supposed to be a sort of amusing throwaway point, but has stirred up a surprising amount of interest.

Michelle wrote to say that one of the example photos was of the very place she used to live in Madison! That is a bit horrifying, one must admit.

It reminds me of an even worse situation of the sort… In around 1996 the Chicago Reader had a cover story one week about an apartment building scandalously packed full with asbestos, and forced into major renovations by the city for that reason, if I’m remembering correctly. You can guess where this is going, maybe– it turned out to be my own apartment building of two years earlier, on Sawyer Avenue just south of Sunnyside (Albany Park, the heavily Korean neighborhood west of Ravenswood Manor).

If I die young of cancer, it will be tough to guess whether the cause was asbestos in Albany Park, or apple shisha in Cairo.

@Logical Regression

Mike, I was in the process of responding but your message got erased through a freak technical situation. Please resend.

an explanation

Here’s the Wikipedia explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilt-shift_miniature_faking

I’m not sure I get the technical aspects of this, but I’m not much of a photographer in the first place.

“tilt shift”

Nick from Accursed Share writes in:

“hey graham,

just saw your ‘real photos that look fake’ post, and thought you’d be interested to know there’s a whole form of photography that creates those types of photos. the effect is called ’tilt shift’ and it produces some truly bizarre photos.

check out the google image search for a whole bunch more:

http://images.google.com/images?q=%22tilt%20shift%22&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

cheers,
-nick”

News to me, but the link is really funny.