what is your favourite food?

today it is

on a spoon

pig-slug

late night doodling

I used to do this all the time but seem to have got out of the habit; drawing pointless pictures when I'm really tired and should be in bed. Seeing as I can't sleep at the moment I am going to take it up again.

furnishing

Folding people's noses out of pictures gives a nice result.

hello pigeon

bee-dog

wow. Bee-Dogs!

tilt-shift

Tilt-shift photography is generally used for architectural photography and often portraits. It involves the use of a special lens which both shifts (usually up and down) and tilts (usually side to side) to change the line of sight without converging parallel lines when photographing tall buildings. It makes use of the Sheimpflug principle, used to describe the effects of when the Plane of Focus in the optical device (here, the camera) is not parallel to the image plane. 

Tilt-shift photography usually uses a very large aperture to achieve a very small depth of field.

A tilt-shifted effect can be created digitally using programmes such as Photoshop to create effects such as below, using the a similar style of depth of focus as that created by a tilt-shift lens. This is done by adding a horizontal cylindrical gradient mask and then adding a lens blur. The saturation of the image is also adjusted to give the overall effect of a painted miniature.

Here are some nice images of digitally made tilt-shift photographs.

There are lots of tutorials on the internet about how to make these yourself. There's a nice easy one on Receding Hairline.

I also found a website which shows how to make a tilt-shift lens using two old SLRs, it's called Found Photography. I think I'm going to try it, just need to get a couple of old cameras first.