a while back i wrote a post about tilt shift photography and how easy it was to create the tilt shift look in photoshop by simply using a couple of filters and masks. of course you can go out and buy a tilt shift lens and every photo can have that look, but they are kind of expensive. since a few friends asked me to show them, i’ll outline the technique right here.

step 1: choose the right photograph
even though you can do this to every photo, not all photographs work the same way. find a photo that you can isolate a specific object in the foreground or middle ground. this will greatly accentuate the effect. i chose a shot i took in athens of the temple of hephaestus from the areopagus.

temple of hephaestus

step 2: duplicate the background: self explanatory

tilt shift 2

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LoveNY

as is usually the case i’m always running late and sept 11, 2001 was no different. by the time i was getting ready to leave park slope for my job on 11th st. and university in manhattan, the towers were hit and getting into manhattan was pointless. gina and i went up on our rooftop to videotape our view. we saw tower one fall a few minutes after we got up top. the plume of dust and debris expanded so fast that we could not see tower two fall. we walked around park slope and everyone was in a speechless daze. by early afternoon dust and ash fell from the sky coating everything in a light gray dust. later that day we saw people who had walked from downtown manhattan back to brooklyn. they were completely covered in gray dust. it was a very surreal sight

love

we finally got into manhattan a couple of days later to check on my apartment on attormey and stanton. manhattan was very solemn and eerie those first few nights. at the vigils in union square park gina and i shot a lot of video and photographs, partly to help us deal with it ourselves. we edited a small piece which was shown on a few cable channels. i’ll have to dig that up. the photographs shown here were featured in the ‘here is new york‘ exhibition and have traveled the globe. they are also in madame tussaud’s permanent exhibit as well as the planned permanent exhibit of the new WTC 9/11 memorial and have been re-printed in many magazines.

hope

we were in athens on the day the fires started. we took this panoramic shot from the areopagus, the hill opposite the acropolis (right side). in the center of the photo is the hill of lycavitos (literally, hill of wolves, although the wolves were killed to extinction ages ago). the view is facing northeast and you can see the plume of smoke rising from behind the hill and the sprawl of athens. in the bottom left of the photograph is the ancient agora. remains have been found there dating to 2800 BC. the large building of the stoa was rebuilt by the rockefeller foundation and is now a museum of antiquities.

the fires spread quickly, due to the high winds of the following two days, burning thousands of acres. one of the many areas that were affected was the city of Marathon, historic home of the famous race. unfortunately, the fire has been attributed to arson. truly sad.

you can view a high-rez version of the photo here
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