Honey, they shrunk the world

Big is the new small, with larger-than-life subjects shrunk to Lilliputian size for a prettier panorama that plays on your visual senses. The trick: Tilt-shift photography. Soumya Mukerji brings the best of macro-minis from photographers who've aced the art

Siddhartha Tawadey
Where: New York
He is an investment banker who turned photographer. Viewing the world from a quaint vantage point should come naturally to him. The Kolkata born-New York-based Tawadey picks references from art, whether the surrealism of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali's paintings, or abstract expressionism of Rothko and Mondrian. And, he works his Tilt-shift lens while travelling.

Siddhartha Tawadey wanted to explore the similarity between rural Bengal and the fields of Japan in this untitled work

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, nicknamed the Toy Train, is a two-feet narrow-gauge railway from Siliguri to Darjeeling in West Bengal. It was shot during one of Tawadey's photo-tours. "And now, it really looks like a toy!" he says

A depiction of London as it would have been in its glory days, as a dream-scape

His current projects are polar opposites, involving abstract design in both, natural and urban environments.

"The world becomes more magical when you indulge in miniature-scale manipulation. Earlier, Tilt-shift was used to correct converging verticals in architectural photography. Now, it provides a different perspective to our interpretation of an image," he says.

It's not about distortion; it's rather an attempt to show the world on a different scale. So, in one of Tawadey's works, you have a herd of buffaloes grazing in Bengal's countryside looking like animals in a glass menagerie.

Tawadey says he'd rather practise the technique while shooting than resort to post-shoot tampering, "Tilt-shift and perspective-control lenses are available for many SLR cameras, but most of them are very expensive. But the Lensbaby SLR lens is a low-cost alternative that provides tilt and swing for many SLR cameras," he suggests.

His trick for a good piece of Tilt-shift work is simple. "Once you have chosen all the parameters, the best picture is the one to which your heart says, 'this is it'."

To see more of Tawadey's work, log on to: www.sidphotography.com

Prasad Raghavan
Where: Mumbai
Here's a man who has never touched tilt-shot in the traditional way, but is out to show you what it means in the symbolic sense. "Tilt-shot is to look at things from a different angle. It's a technique of the mind, not
of technology," muses Raghavan. "It's like, when you want to observe something in all its detail and discover something different about it, you tilt your head."

The Executive, The Parliamentary and The Doctor

The Police and The Engineer

And so, the Kerala native plays on the term and calls his version Shot-Tilt. The exhibition of installations that's on at BMB Gallery till June 28 has the following characters -- a policeman, doctor, and executive among
others. "They are the most powerful people, but also the most corrupt and monstrous."

So, in Shot-Tilt, they play convicts up for public criticism. Raghavan debates the idea of desire and false promises. "We live in a society that constantly generates desire, transforming us into voracious, consuming subjects; the result is garbage and guilt. There are lots of false promises around us, and my idea is to analyse and understand these through the creation of false icons and images of rubbish, sin and culpability."

Tilt-shift lenses to look out for: Canon's 17 mm, 24 mm, 45 mm, and 90 mm tilt/shift lenses. Nikon's 24 mm, 45 mm, and 85 mm PC (perspective control) lenses with tilt and shift capability.

How to tilt your lens when
You want all of the field in focus: As you tilt the lens, you make the focus plane tilt. However, a small tilt of the lens creates a huge tilt in the focus plane. Just 10 degrees of lens tilt can rotate the focus plane to the point that places your subject a meter away, at the bottom of the frame.

You want everything out of focus except for the subject: Say there is a row of columns ahead of you, running left to right. Tilt sharply, focus one column, and the equally distant neighbours to the left and right will all be blurred.

Fake it for free: Most good tilt-shift lenses could cost you over a lakh. If you don't want that big a hole in your pocket, log on to https://www.tiltshiftmaker.com/, and land a great piece of art without moving a limb in two steps: Upload a photo, select the area in focus, and there you are.

Master of Tilt-shift
Olivo Barbieri, a 56 year-old Italian, is the undoubted master of the art. He started the Site Specific project in 2003, and shot Rome, Montreal, Amman, Las Vegas, Shanghai and Seville, among other places, in a way the world had never seen before. "Tilt-shift allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don't read [it as an] image but one line at a time. I was a little tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything," Barbieri had said in an interview.

The twin-tower tragedy gave Barbieri's creativity an impetus. "After 9/11, the world had become a bit blurred because things that seemed impossible, happened. My desire was to look at the city again," he said in another report. Barbieri uses a chopper to get a bird's eye view of his sprawling subjects, before he zeroes in on them with his Tilt-shift lenses to reduce them to tiny toys.

Olivo Barbieri's exhibition is currently on at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York till May 28. Log on to www.yanceyrichardson.com

The Handbook

How to Tilt-shot on Photoshop
>>Open the shot (preferably a landscape-style picture) in Adobe Photoshop and click on "quick mask mode".
>>Select the gradient tool.
>>Select the "cylindrical gradient reflected gradient".
>>Draw vertically upwards from where you want the point of focus to be, up the screen to the top of the window, and release the mouse button. A red transparent line should appear.
>>Go back into "Standard Mask Mode".
>>In Photoshop CS2 or CS3 go to Filter >> Blur >> Lens Blur (or if you have Photoshop 7.0 you can use Gaussian Blur). Select the amount of blur you'd like. You can experiment with the radius value a bit to see what sort of blur looks best.
>>For a more "plastic" feel you can increase the saturation and contrast in the photo.

What is tilt-shift?
It is a camera movement used to create an optical illusion that makes scenes appear as if they are miniature models. The outer edges are often blurred, which tricks the eye into perceiving everything in the unblurred parts as miniature. This involves two steps: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. It requires painstaking precision and expensive lenses.
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What makes it happen?
It's thanks to the Scheimpflug principle. It is a geometric rule that describes the orientation of the plane of focus of an optical system when the lens plane is not parallel to the image plane. It is named after Austrian army captain Theodor Scheimpflug, who used it in devising a systematic method and apparatus for correcting perspective distortion in aerial photographs.