The Tilt-Shift "Miniature" Effect

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What It Is
Overhead shots of people, cars, trucks or other vehicles that look like miniature figurines. The may look like tiny dioramas, but are actually real scenes captured with a tilt-shift lens, which allows you to control perspective in your image by tilting and shifting the lens in front of the sensor or film to produce an extremely shallow depth of field. The effect is enhanced with lenses with very wide apertures (i.e., low-f/stop numbers)—this puts certain objects in sharp focus while others are blurred. The skewed perspective creates the illusion you're looking at a miniature scale model of a scene. The look can also be produced with software which simulates the tilt-shift lens effect.

How It's Done
A tilt-shift lens, also called a perspective control lens, lets you physically change the axis of the glass element in front of your digital SLR's image sensor or film. If you're going for the miniature effect, you'll want to focus on the tilt control of the lens, not the shift. Tilt is measured in degrees and is adjusted by turning knobs on the side of the lens barrel. The glass will literally tilt in front of the sensor or film, allowing the photographer to control where the sharpest point of focus should go in an image. And since the lens' wide aperture will create a very narrow plane of focus–or shallow depth-of-field–only a small part of the image will be sharp while the rest will be dramatically blurred.

To "miniaturize" cars or people in an image, keep those subjects in focus while leaving the backgrounds, such as landscapes or buildings, blurred. It also increases the effect if you're shooting down on your subject, such as from a hill or an airplane. The miniaturized look can be duplicated in software or via websites such as TiltShiftMaker.com, but it's not as striking as when done with an actual tilt-shift lens. Be forewarned, however, perspective-control lenses are not cheap.