Fake Tilt Shift Photos

It’s always bugged me how confident people can be about what they see and hear, or touch smell and taste for that matter. Maybe it’s just me. Have you ever had the taste of cheap tequila just appear in your mouth? Or have some smell drift into your nostrils that nobody else can smell? I have, often enough to know it’s some part of my brain playing tricks on me. Hearing is just as bad, but vision is perhaps the least reliable sense. Of course most of the time this is a feature of the system instead of a bug. The brain can take a signal that is mostly noise and extract the meaningful data without us even realizing what it’s doing. A very useful skill if your hunkered down in the bush and from all of the data your taking in from your eyes, ears, nose and even the vibrations of the ground that you feel through your bare feet the short hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up and you know something is out there and it’s watching you.

Optical illusions illustrate just how much processing the brain does on the raw inputs that our eyes take in and even provide a window into the types of data crunching that the brain does. It goes beyond simple optical illusions though. Our brains can internalize and adjust for things that we don’t even understand and have never even spent any time thinking about. For an example lets look at miniature photography. If some one shows you a photo of diorama of small models, no matter how detailed the models there are subtle cues that your mind picks up on that tell you your looking at miniatures. This is so reliable that you can create photographs and even video that fool you into thinking that you are looking at a miniature. Some great examples of this were posted on Jalopnik.com this week here and here. The trick is playing with the depth of field of the photo. Basically this is means that the photographer is adjusting the area of the photo that is in focus. The lenses that are used and the conditions that miniatures are photographed under mean that most photographs of miniatures have a very narrow depth of field meaning that only a small portion of the photo is usually in focus. A clever photographer can manipulate this depth of field to make big things look small. The method used in the above links was done by using tilt shift lenses, meaning that the photographer can not only adjust the depth of field but the plane of focus. But there is an even easier way to do it, it’s not quite as effective but it’s much cheaper and is an even better illustration of how easy it is to fool the parts of the brain that process vision. All you have to do is take a photo and blur most of the photo. Here’s an example I cooked up in a few minutes in GIMP.

From Fake Tilt Shift

That one came out pretty good. better than this one.

From Fake Tilt Shift

I kind of like these too even if the effect is more subtle.

From Fake Tilt Shift

From Fake Tilt Shift

Even more reasons I find it hard to trust what I see.