I've recently discovered Tilt-shift photography. The original technique involves actual camera and lens manipulation. By tilting a lens attached to a camera by a bellow an effect is achieved where a narrow slice of the image is in focus, producing an artificially shallow depth of field which makes the image appear to be a miniature or scale model of the real thing. Tilt-shift photos are said to be "faked".
Its recently become popular to produce the same effect digitally using tools such as Photoshop, and Flickr has some excellent examples as well as tilt-shift pools for both "real" tilt-shift and digital tilt-shift. I'm just getting started with this technique by following some tutorials.
My own tip... When buildings in the scene rise above the surroundings, the default gradient selection will cause the lens blur effect to blur some parts of the building while other parts are in focus. A better result can be achieved by manually "painting" the selection when in Quick Mask mode so that all parts of a buildings or structures in the same plane are selected, then when the lens blur effect is applied the building will appear to pop out of the background better.
This is definitely a lot of fun, and its a great creative outlet in the winter if you haven't had the chance to get out do actual photography. Here's my tilt-shift set on Flickr.
This example was made from a photograph of the town of Sahun, in the mountains of Spain in the province of Aragon.
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