Forced perspectives

Learn how to play with scale and force perspective to transform model cars into life-size vehicles. James Paterson gets his toys out

Use clever angles and focus tricks to bring toy cars to life

Forced perspective photography is one of the oldest visual tricks in the book, and also one of the most fun. With careful arrangement of objects in a scene, we can fool the eye by combining small and large elements into a believable whole. Even better, it gives us the perfect excuse to play with model cars.

This project is a prime opportunity to make use of shooting skills and Photoshop magic, as it requires a little of both. We’ll start off by setting up our model car. The height of objects plays an important role in how our eyes perceives them in a standard 2D image. So in order to create our illusion, we must raise the car off the ground and line it up with the scene behind.

From a technical point of view, the main hurdle we have to overcome is depth of field. We need to bring the car in very close to the lens, and the closer an object is, the less depth of field – so even at the narrowest apertures the plane of focus is limited. The solution is to use focus stacking. By shooting several frames then bringing together the sharp parts, we can extend the depth of field to cover everything we need.

Then we head into Photoshop to piece everything together. As our set of images is in alignment, this should be a simple task. We can use the Auto-Blend command to focus stack our images, then combine it with the background scene and drop in our two figures using layer masks.