Thanks to a video posted by Elissa I discovered the wonderful shift/tilt technique. Photographers use this to create an illusion of a miniature model by having a very small plane of focus with the rest of the image blurred. The result? Real places and people looking like a fake model set! While you can spend hundreds of dollars on a shift/tilt camera, the same effect can be achieved with some simple Photoshop editing, which I have done below to a few of my own pictures. This technique can be used with any image but only gives the miniature set illusion with images taken from above and with very wide frame. I found that the ones with crowds achieve this look the best.
The first two were the most successful and are photographs taken from a summer concert in Utah. The third is the Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen and the fourth is an ancient ampitheatre in Italy. I will be experimenting with this technique more in the future. If you have Photoshop, look up the how to and give it a shot!
Kirsten Captures 