Union Square, San Francisco in miniature
I created this photograph of Union Square in San Francisco by merging four separate captures to create a single panorama image. The photo was taken from a hotel room on one of the upper floors of the Sir Francis Drake hotel. As you might have guessed, it is named after the legendary explorer of course. Who, it should be pointed out, never actually stopped at San Francisco, and sailed straight past. Be that as it may, the hotel had preserved a lot of its original art deco style and the hotel room view was fabulous, especially around dusk looking south towards the San Bruno Mountains in the distance. This photograph is also a good one with which to demonstrate what I like to think of as a miniaturising technique that can be applied when editing raw files in Camera Raw or Lightroom.
Essentially, this is an effect that’s achieved by adding blur to both the foreground and distance to simulate the kind of look you would get when photographing, say, a model railway scene where the photographs would typically have a narrower depth of focus. It is a photo-editing technique that was popularised in the noughties, especially by those shooting video. To see what I mean, check out ‘The Sandpit’ by Sam O’Hare [vimeo.com/9679622]. What is good about the method I show here is that if you shoot a set of time-lapse sequence of stills images, you can quickly sync the blur effect settings across all the selected images. Having done that, you can then export these as a time-lapse video clip via the Slideshow module.
Martin Evening has a background in advertising and landscape photography. He is also well known for his knowledge of Photoshop and Lightroom, plus books on digital imaging. Visit www.martinevening.com.