The Tilt-Shift Phenomenon

What separates production value from company to company is the ability to FOLLOW trends, and at the same time, stay above the CLUTTER of trends.

You might know what looks good. But that’s not the same as being able to create good design or even guide someone to design good design.

Recognizing good design is Step One.

Step Two is being aware of today’s good design. It is either good, or it used to be good.

But if you make something like that, you are only one of the crowd pushing and shoving to match a trend.

The issue comes in the form of mimicking – without actually re-creating.

An Experimental Lens

Brilliantly aesthetic, the method known as “tilt shift” photography has been available since the dawn of photography and lenses. The very appropriate and very literal name for this type of photography is entirely self-explanatory, although, it’s confusing even to some photographers. While social media, television, and the Internet have all assisted the distribution of the visuals, it is something that most SLR and DSLR camera owners never knew they already had access to! Surprised me, too, when I discovered it. Yes, with the help of social media. Yes, with Pinterest, specifically.

The most basic method to achieve this mesmerizing effect is to tilt your lens and shift its position. It may sound frightening to try, but if you’ve got a nice 50mm 1.4/f lens, disconnect the lens from the camera, and tilt it slightly as you look into the viewfinder (the LCD or otherwise). You will begin to see a blurry fall-off, much like you would when establishing a shallow depth of field. This is called “free-lensing” – another very literal and appropriate name for a technique.

One look at a tilt shift lens, and you will see the concept. And you will appreciate the safety of a secure lens with the capability to tilt and shift.

A photo posted by Zak Ciotti (@zakciotti) on Feb 25, 2015 at 8:03am PST

Just look at that thing! It’s weird, isn’t it? Well, that’s how people usually respond to my Lensbaby 80mm lens.

Internet, meet Tilt-Shift When did this become popular? In my observation, I began noticing this technique and lens being used on this video by Keith Loutit:

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo. Loutit found his niche and created footage, as a shareable story and music video, with his tilt-shift lens. Surely he wasn’t the first, but suffice it to say, he knew how to seize the shareable moment. He made us stop and think “Gee whiz, isn’t that a detailed model.” Not for a moment did the untrained eye think this could be real. Even to him, who knew nothing of tilt-shift, cocked his head sideways (not unlike the lens itself) and pondered on the impossibility of such a model’s detail. The next thought that baffled the photography savant, who knew of the magic in front of the camera, questioned his own theory as the angles seemed too perfectly still to be true. While some of his recent work includes 3D mapping and a difficult method of producing the look, it is his traditional tilt-shift look that captured the attention of the Internet.

Faker!

Can you tell the difference between FAUX and REAL tilt shift? I don’t want to take away or try to recreate the amazing article prepared by Mike Solomon about comparing the differences which you can find here, but I will introduce you to the idea and show you something you probably haven’t seen. It’s this attention to detail that separates the good quality from the great.

Whether you knew it or not, our minds have been trained to watch movies, to look at photos, and we remember (perhaps mostly subconsciously) what the differences are. Our reaction might now be to be able to point out the differences between fake blur and real blur, but something jolts us. It may be as simple as recognizing that something isn’t natural, and therefore aesthetic and magical to our eyes.

Tilt-shift, when observed for the first time appears to create a “miniature” effect. This is where you realize that you knew more about lenses than you knew you knew. The effect reminds our eyes that models and small things on film, in movies, in photographs will have a shallow depth of field. And tilt-shift APPEARS to have a shallow depth of field, when actually it does not.

Let’s say you want to fake a tilt-shift photograph. You would find a photo that was taken from a medium-height building and blur the bottom and the top halves, and leave it clear in the middle. You might fiddle with lighting and brighten the shadows to give it a plastic appearance.

One problem occurs when you attempt this bad idea: the blur does not gradually increase the further it gets from the clear center. The second problem is the blur itself. Highlights such as these in a night-time photograph will become foggy and less bright. They do not “bloom” into bokeh (the Japanese cognate referring to the circular shape of spots in real blur).

If you keep up with trends only to mimic them, congrats, you are now one of the many. Being a good designer in this aspect is the equivalent of inventing a new tilt-shift method.

What do you think? Real or faux?

A photo posted by Zak Ciotti (@zakciotti) on Apr 8, 2015 at 8:42am PDT

This is something new. Something I’ve never seen before which I took upon myself to try. By filming the scene in a deep depth of field with a Canon 16mm L-series lens, and without moving the camera’s position, I subsequently decreased the focus of the lens for three more shots. Then in post I created layers of masks which revealed a gradation of blurriness (and varying sizes of bokeh). The first scene in this video for H&R Block’s cash machine campaign is what I ended up with:

H&R Block – Kansas City from Zak Ciotti on Vimeo.

I might call it “Fauxcus” to be really cheesy. This method could be used with any lens. The trick is to avoid scenes that have vertically-moving objects, such as vehicles or other things equally distinct. Depending on how many steps of the scene you shoot, it could be significantly more detailed. In this situation, I did the minimum, just as a test, and found that by taking the attention away from the background with on screen text was a way to not overdo it.

Another method I would love to test is using a black to white gradient as the Z-map in either Frischluft’s Lenscare or Boris’ Lens Blur plugins. Theoretically, this would solve the muddy issue of feathering the masks with my Fauxcus technique. But I haven’t had the chance to cheat with them as of yet.

The whole point of “focus” is to draw attention where it needs to be in order to effectively tell the story or send a message. Easily, new students who endeavor to achieve similar effects are often caught up in the look without using it for a purpose. Many small companies who hire brand new filmmakers or artists run into this issue. That’s where following principles of branding and research-based decision-making is most valuable: where new innovators meet experienced professionals.

New techniques often come by finding them, happening upon them, but every once and a while you get the inspiration to create them. I never feel like it comes from me, when an idea pops into my head, but it certainly thrills me to be there when it works.  What do you think?  Leave your comments below.

By Zak Ciotti, Greenroom Communications Director of Production