Thanks to a friend I was finally able to ‘remember’ what this technique is called.  Tilt shift photography is a photographic technique whereby the lens is used to distort the image’s perspective, creating an optical illusion that the undistorted area is very small.

After fiddling around and googling a bit (and finding some excellent video and photo examples that I’ll link below), I fiddled around some with my favorite video editing program and figured out how to fake this effect.  I’ve done a handful of images from my travels in summer of 2009, and created a Picasa album that you see to the left (click the image or this link to view the entire Picasa album).

I’m really fascinated by this technique, and am thinking of doing a bunch of these and releasing them as a commercial desktop wallpaper package.  I’d love to hear some feedback on that idea.

Here’s a couple of excellent videos employing the TS technique