So I was doing my usual rounds of aimless web surfing the a few weeks ago, and I came across the unusual photography of one Olivo Barbieri. This particular gentleman likes to hang out of the side of helicopters with his funky tilt-shift lens and take photographs of landmarks to make them look like little train-set sized miniatures.



I really wanted to give photos like that a go - but the lens is costly, and I couldn't justify the expenditure (not to mention the fact that I don't have an SLR to attach the damn thing to anyway). Imagine my joy, then, when I found out that you can quite easily fake the effect using pretty much any decent graphics editing package. I've got this whole big thing about making cheaper cameras do funky things via post-processing - you might have noticed :P

To acquire the right kind of photo to 'tilt-shift' (try saying that ten times quickly), it helps if you are high-up looking down. The above photo was originally taken by Briony when we were coming in to Sydney (from Melbourne) to land. I ran it through the tilt-shifting process (just a bit of masking and blurring), leading to more-or-less instant miniaturisation of good ole Sydney.



I took the above photo from the back porch at work, and again tilt-shifted it. There's a giant, enormous flickr group dedicated to faking the tilt-shift effect - it's worth a browse to see some really peculiar photos.

Labels: graphics, photos, travel

 

The Easter weekend was spent in Melbourne, where Kavitha kindly put us up in her new place in sunny Auburn. Briony has already covered the weekend in some detail, so I'll just add a few scrappy bits of commentary.

Melbourne itself looks and feels a lot more like a European city. Looking out over the rooftops, you wouldn't be hard-pressed to imagine it looked a bit like London. That said, the centre of the city is pretty cosmopolitan. The Eureka tower, dominating the Melbourne skyline, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Half-Life 2 citadel. Woo, spooky.

Something which did surprise me was the National Gallery of Victoria. Sitting somewhere in-between a museum and an art-gallery, it was pretty accessible (even the modern art), and the free entry helped too. This means I'll be getting up off my rear and visiting a few galleries here, too. I think I'll start with the MCA - it's open late on Wednesday nights, so that'll be a good time to take a wander through.



I'll accompany Briony along to the occasional Church service (trying to learn a bit more about what it's all about, that sort of thing), and the Easter service at Sts Peter and Paul in South Melbourne with Father Bob was an education unto itself. Fr. Bob is very much more a caricature of himself in real-life than what you see on the TV or hear on the radio.

The enduring memory I'll have is of the elderly, but terrifyingly fast, Fr. Bob running up and down the aisles with his little smoke generating thingo during a hymn. He terrorises unsuspecting members of his congregation, and he doesn't mind speaking his mind. The man is a law unto himself, he gets people thinking, and that's a good thing to see :)

Labels: HDR, photos, travel