Arts and Culture Features

Miniature Coppins Bridge © David Yates

Creative amateur photographer David Yates has lived on the Isle of Wight all his life.

Based in the Victorian seaside town of Ventnor, David runs his own window cleaning business and spends his free time pursuing his passion for photography.

David has always liked playing about with cameras, and caught the 'shutterbug' in earnest about 15 years ago, starting off with a normal 35mm SLR camera, and developing his own negatives.

One technique he's particularly adept at is the fun 'tilt-shift' process which creates the illusion of a life-size location or subject looking like a miniature model:

David Yates

"By having one part of the picture in focus, and by blurring other parts of the picture, you can make things look tiny."

Creating a toyland

It's something anyone can try their hand at, but to get a really good tilt-shift effect, you need to think 'small and vivid' as David explains:

"The best thing really is looking down onto something, say you were looking at a model village, you'd look down onto it, you wouldn't look at it at eye level. Models are often painted in bright colours so you'll also need to boost up the saturation and contrast."

Mini bench tilt-shift photoshop fake © David Yates

There are several ways of producing a tilt-shift picture. David uses a Calument 5x4 Monorail camera made for architectural photography.

"The rear of the camera where the film goes you can move it left or right, up and down, forward and back and the front of the camera where the lens goes you can do the same and with that - so you can put any part of the picture in or out of focus."

Another way to achieve the style is a tilt-shift lens which goes on a normal camera, either SLR or digital and the lens will rotate left, right up or down and sideways which will give the effect as well.

Faking it

You can also get the effect through Photoshop by blurring parts of your life-size photographs, or for a quick and easy result you can simply upload your photos into tilt-shift style miniatures using a online editing tool site.

Check out David's websites for a tilt-shift photoshop tutorial and a gallery of some of his stunning tilt-shift minatures.