Tilt Shift or PP?

[LostMahbles]

Hello everyone,

A while back there was a post that asked people to list some of the photographers that give them inspiration and someone (I believe it was Jim Bryant) suggested the work of Tony Hoffer, a wedding photographer from Philadelphia. His work is amazing and he has one particular technique that confuses me as a new photographer.

Rather than try to explain it, I've linked three of the photos here. It seems to defy the rules of DoF since it appears that the focus does not depend on the distance from the lens.

http://hofferphotography.com/blogpics/Fetherolf-12.jpg

and

http://hofferphotography.com/blogpics/Mack-7.jpg

and

http://hofferphotography.com/blogpics/TobinW-8.jpg

This seems like something that could be done fairly easily in Photoshop with a simple blur layer and a gradient mask, but because there are imperfections (the edges of the subjects often still have some blur), it suggests to me that it can be done SOOC. I don't really know much about tilt-shift lenses, but could this effect be the result of using a tilt-shift? Otherwise, I have no idea.

Thanks for the insight everyone!

[wulf]

It could be done with something like a Lensbaby lens. There are a few discussions tagged with lensbaby that might help (try tiltshift too).

Looking at the images you linked to, I wonder if those were done with either post-processing or a more predictable lens than the basic lensbaby I've got. I can see the appeal of predictability for wedding photography although I rather like the chance of getting an unexpected result with my lensbaby.

Wulf

[fletch]

As far as I know this could be done with a Tilt shif lens. Its not beyond the wit of man to do it in photoshop though.

Either way I don't like the effect, its very distracting to have such an obvious special effect and it takes away from the subject IMO.

[OsmosisStudios]

It CAN be done with a tilt-shift lens, though im pretty sure they're post.

If you look at the first image, a tilt-shift lens with those settings would have some geometric correction in the building: there isn't any. That screams Photoshop.

It's well done, but i'd say it's photoshop.

[teaking]

Tilt shift is cool to do to fake miniatures and after doing something similar this can definitely done in PP.

Using layers and duplicates of your image use an oblong with round corners to select your clear spot and set it to white and blue then mask your image with this. Then take a copy of the original and blur the image placing it behind the mask this should give you the general effect you can sharpen the original before hand if you wish and up the saturation a bit to enhance the effect... well thats what I have found out up to now or at least my way lol

[cphoniball]

You could produce the same effect with a tilt-shift lens. This looks like photoshop though, the blur is way too uniform to be from a tilt lens, at least judging from the blur I've seen from tilt-shift pictures I've seen before.