How To Make Anything Look Like a Toy

In artist Olivo Barbieri ’s photographs, the six-acre Roman Colosseum resembles an upside-down soda cap, Las Vegas and Rome look like model-train landscapes, and an 80,000-ton boat seems as if a child could pluck it from the water.

copyright © Olivo Barbieri

It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real!

To create this effect, Barbieri uses a tilt-frame camera to shift the plane of focus so that it is out of alignment with the film. Normally, this allows wide-angle aerial views to be captured in proper perspective. But used incorrectly, an optical illusion occurs.

http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-06/rd/toys

Japanese photographer Naoki Honjo (and now many others!) uses the same technique

Gimmicky? but really cool!

Could we do the same with a simple shift/tilt lense ?
e.g. for my ukrainian ‘Hasselblad’ (Kiev 88cm):
http://www.kievcamera.com/product.php?ID=175