Automatt’s “There are no mini disasters | Fire safety is everyone’s business” is a really interesting photo of tilt shift. Upon first glance, I didn’t think for a minute that this scene was real. The smoke emitting from the building looked too perfect and mimicked stretched cotton balls. The way the fire trucks were lit also made me feel as if they were model trucks with light kits installed. Even the building from which the fire is emitting looked too perfect and clean to be real. Usually with architectural models, the modelers don’t weather the textures because they want to present a perfect looking piece to their customers and that’s what this building looks like. The entire compositions combined with the point of view made me totally omit the possibility of a real scene being captured with tilt shift, but apparently I’m wrong! Tilt shift is achieved when you use a tilt shift lens which has a shift depth of field. As you’re photographing, you can adjust the placement of the lens as well as the image recorder so that background and foreground objects are fused into a smaller looking area. It also helps when the tilt shift images are taken from an aerial perspective or high enough off the ground to the point where you don’t have any of the sky in the image because that would be the only factor that would give the tilt shift away.
Automatt. There are no mini disasters | Fire safety is everyone’s business. Flickr, March 28, 2006, https://www.flickr.com/photos/automatt/119040637/.