TOY TOWN
Get the tilt-shift effect in Photoshop
When photographing small objects such as toys, you tend to get images with a shallow depth of field. Foreground and background are blurred, and only the toy remains in focus. This effect is due to the close proximity of the camera to the subject. When shooting a large subject, such as a cityscape, you tend to be much further away from whatever you’re photographing, enabling you to get everything in the scene in focus.
However, if you shoot a city scene with a so-called tilt-shift lens, you can create a narrower band of focus. This produces the blurred foreground and background you get in photographs of toys. As a result, vehicles can look like playthings! However, tilt-shift lenses are very expensive, and can also be fiddly to use.
Using Adobe Camera Raw’s Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush, you can recreate the effect quickly and cheaply, and by producing the effect in Camera Raw, you’ll also be preserving image quality.