Seattle in Miniature :dltphoto

One clever little feature that has been added to cameras for sometime now is "diorama" or "tilt 'n' shift" mode. A clever technique of selective in focus and out of focus portions making the image seem like its of a little scale model of a city or scene. Ultimately as good as this option is on a camera, the scene is really the make or break to a successful fooling of the eyes. My initial attempts from my recent one night visit to Seattle have given me some better insight of how to approach future diorama shots and there will be more, I promise.
My new Olympus TG-850 has this diorama mode as one of its "art filters". So I am basically shooting the scene and the camera is doing all the work for me. The key to a realistic fake City picture is having a high view point of a street view with people and cars, ideally not moving  fast that they are blurred. No fake city model ever has fast moving static cars, got it??!!
Here are some of my attempts.

Just for fun I wondered through the city mall to see if that's viable too. One thing I lacked in both scene's was people. I managed to convince 3 'random' persons to wander through my mall scene though!!!

Sunsets through a Lens :dltphoto

So, we have all seen beautiful sunsets. Many times they are so incredibly hard to photograph and you really just can't capture on camera what your seeing. Also as a creative photographer how do you make this sunset be something that someone wants to look at. How many variations of a sunset can be done before its all been done??

I just found some images from my camping this year and I remembered that I had attempted to change my normal view to something more creative or did i just something crap and should I delete it?

 I have shot through these trees a million times and I am sure I have dozens of images like this on previous posts. Can I do something more to make this some thing everyone will want to look at? What if I make it out of focus?

At the time I thought this looked pretty cool. I have never done an out of focus sunset before. At least not this intentional! So I pushed it a little further...

How abstract can one now start to get? Is it now a beautiful sunset on the lake or just some computer generated file from some paint program?? What now? Can I really show this? After all now it has no context. No obvious signs that its a beautiful moment in time by a lake with a camera..

Did I create a design piece?

Hmmm, Or is it just a orange blob with some vague reddish blobs???

Can I use the two images together?

      Original                                                   Out of Focus                                  Combined

Perhaps I should just stick to my day blob!!!

The End