Weekly Challenge, Tiny Giants and 2013 Roundup
Ames Room Illusion - Source - anopticalillusion.com
Wait a minute, it's saturday. Wasn't the weekly challenge supposed to be up yesterday? Yes. See I was having a hard time with this week's challenge. The challenge was to make something small appear to be big, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to try some forced perspective shots. If you don't know what I mean, you probably at the very least have heard of the Ames Room. You know the one where you walk from one side of the room and you go from being a giant to a midget. It's an illusion to make your brain think things are changing sizes when they really aren't. Well see, without an elaborate set design that's kind of hard to achieve realistically. So I thought of trying to force perspective and use a deep enough depth of field to make a model car seem like it's parked next to a real car and appear to be realistically sized.
There's a couple of reasons why I failed this. To achieve this you need both to have your smaller subject to be placed closer to the camera and the real object, in this case a car, to be placed far enough back to frame the car much smaller in relation to the model car in the scene. You also need to use an aperture that is very small to make both cars appear to be on the same focal plane when they really aren't. If either of the cars are out of focus, you won't be fooling anyone. That requires you to get fairly close to your front subject. With something as small as a model car though, getting close enough is going to be a hard task. So if you use a macro lens to be able to get closer to your tiny subject you then run into the problem of not being able to increase the depth of field to make the scene look believable, even at f22. So, despite taking the extra time to try to get this shot right and also trying other smaller things out to make them appear bigger, I still failed. In lieu of this, I made a 2013 roundup of some of my photography from the past year. Next week I'll be back with a challenge whose ass I can kick. I'm 2:3 right now and I'm determined to not fail a third time in a row.