Friday, November 23, 2007

Middlesbrough Industry in Miniature

Here are a selection of aerial photographs of the industry around my home town of Middlesbrough that have been manipulated to make them look like they're small scale models.

I did this using Photoshop using a selection of pictures that I found on a website by Middlesbrough photographer Alan Clements. I sent these pics off to Alan and he kindly gave permission for me to post them up here for others to see. The original versions of the photographs can be seen on Alan's site here www.pbase.com/clements
They're in the section marked Industry.

I think they look quite effective, some look better than others, this technique doesn't work on all pictures as well as others. I'd seen some pictures like this of Rome and other famous places but I believe that those images were actually taken with a special lens, this is a quick and easy version to get a similar effect.

Thanks Alan, for letting me use your wonderful photographs. Check out his site for lots of other neat piccy's.

6 comments:

I. N. J. Culbard said...

These are cool.

There's an artist/photographer who works/worked this way called Olivo Barbieri. He did it using a tilt-frame camera which basically shifts the plane of focus so it's off kilter with the film. It's actually a technique used to capture wide angle aerial shots in perspective but if you make a pigs ear of it this 'model set' effect occurs, which leads me to believe that this was once an artistic 'happy' accident.

You should check out this forum for tutorials on technique... not because I think you need tutorials on technique, heck they look great, but because some of the results other people have achieved using Photoshop have been posted and they look pretty cool... the cyclists on the bridge however really is a model, but I love the image of the ruins. And the tutorial's quite good too.

http://tinyurl.com/y9fnd7

Andrew Glazebrook said...

That's not quite the technique I used but very close. It works a lot better with certain pics tan others !

Moonwatcher said...

So these aren't models then ? That's amazing !

Michael Grant Clark said...

These are fun. One of me mates (actoman) is teaching this technique in college just now, I'll send him a link.

AktoMan said...

One of my students found an article in Wired, and then at /recedinghairline.co.uk and just followed the instructions. She found a pile on Flickr too.

I've still got to find some spare time to do any of this.

Andrew Glazebrook said...

It really does seem to work wonderfully with some pics, stuff like cars etc... and not so with others, it's all to do with the angle of the pic too.you need to be able to get the right amount of foreground out of focus too.