Farewell to Summer

Every time summer comes around I swear I'm going to hate it. I hate being hot and I miss being able to wear my assortment of sophisticated cardigans. But then summer ends, and I remember all the fun I had and I find summer far more difficult to hate.

This year I spent the first day of summer at the beach with my sister and brother. I floated down the Boise river, went wine tasting in Sonoma, camped at a campground with no water or toilets, floated around my pool on my pink raft with my pink sunglasses, was adorned with dozens of Play Doh jewels, saw the last Harry Potter with a whole lot of self-proclaimed wizards, and went to Disneyland over and over.

Now summer is officially over, and pumpkins are starting to show up everywhere, and that's nice too. It's nice how things work like that, always going around until you're excited for jacket weather and then excited for beach weather and then excited for jacket weather again.

Tilt-Shift Your Way to Glory

I'm kind of obsessed with tilt-shift photography. Which is a shame because I've only been able to pull off a tilt-shift once so far.

Tilt-shift refers to the practice of adjusting the focus of a photo or video in such a way that the content looks like a miniature model, preferably complete with little tiny people bustling around. Fancy-pants people accomplish this with a tilt-shift lens on their fancy-pants camera, but the effect can be accomplished well enough in Photoshop. In fact, the Camera 360 app I have on my phone has a tilt-shift option.

by Jack Ambridge

The part I find tricky is finding locations high enough to take a good shot from, as you kind of need to be... up to pull off a good tilt-shift image. If you search for "tilt-shift" on Flickr you will find an excess of examples of people trying to make a tilt-shift image out of photos that are just plain too close.

So, if you're going to try this, be sure you're taking your photo from far away and from above. Or below, I guess. It's possible to make a tilt-shift photo from ground-level, but I've seen very few examples where it hasn't come out looking lame. Once you've got a photo that you think will look cute all fake-miniaturized, here's a good tutorial on how to get the effect. Or just upload it to TiltShiftMaker.com. You know, whichever.

The one I made was done in Photoshop, and I took it from the top of Mickey's Fun Wheel in Disney's California Adventure park.