Add a creative twist

Play with toys

1 Take control This time the creative version was slightly more complicated. Instead of using our standard, wide-angle zoom, we attached a 90mm ‘perspective correction’ (or tilt-shift) lens, and then tilted the front elements down as far as they would go, using the dial on the side. This had the effect of blurring everything except a very narrow band of the scene.

2 Stay focus ed Zooming right in on the preview image in Live View, we then used the focus ring on the PC lens to manually focus precisely on the middle of the nearest bridge, Blackfriars. This ensured that only this bridge, and anything crossing it, would be in focus, and it’s this extreme differential focus that gives our finished image its toy-town feel (since shallow depth of field is typical of model village shots). 3 Freeze the motion For the toy-town effect to work, we needed to cars to be as static as possible, as any blurring would make them look less like toys (or completely invisible if the shutter speed was slow enough). To keep the shutter speed as high as possible, we set an aperture of f/2.8 (which had the advantage of blurring the foreground and background even more) and raised the ISO to 800.

4 Time it to perfection This gave us a shutter speed of 1/30 sec, which was just fast enough to freeze the movement of pedestrians and slower moving traffic on the bridge. Lastly, we waited until a boat was passing under the bridge before releasing the shutter, which added to the toy-town feel. Again, a remote release was useful for getting the timing just right.