28/52 - New Orleans - Tilt Shift

I know that I say this a lot, but this is another picture that I've been wanting to attempt for a little while now.  I've seen this effect done many times before and never knew that I could do it, using a standard lens, until just recently.  There are lenses out there designed to produce this effect, specifically the Lensbaby line, but I didn't realize the same effect could just be applied in Photoshop.  I'm sure the effect isn't the same as if you were to capture it using a special tilt-shift lens, but I thought it still looked kind of cool.

My example here isn't a great one for a few reasons.
1.  I don't have very much height compared to the subject I'm trying to bring the effect on: the people down on the street.  To really achieve this the best way possible, I'd need to be higher up.
2.  I took it during the night and its' not an overly well lit photo.  I know you can still get a good tilt-shift photo done at night time, but I'd need a little more light on the subjects to make it better.
3.  I think I might have over applied the effect.  I think that I blurred out the other areas of the photo a little too much. 

But, the effect is noticable still the same.  The result of the effect is to make the subject look almost 'miniature' or look like a small model replica of the scene you're shooting.  There is one single band of the photo that is in focus and everything else is out of focus, which, for whatever reason, makes the subjects look small or fake.

So, a few weeks ago, I was traveling through New Orlans visiting a customer.  Luckily, we stayed in a hotel right on Bourbon Street.  It wasn't quite as crazy as I thought or had pictured it was going to be, but it was still farily busy for only being a Wednesday night.  I walked around for the evening with my camera, snapping pictures of whatever I could find that I thought was interesting and got some decent ones.  Then, I decided to go up on the balcony of the hotel and try getting pictures of the crowd with the intention of putting together this tilt-shift photo.  I was using my 50mm lens, so that on top of my cropped sensor camera body resulted in about a 85-90mm zoom in my veiwfinder.  Being that I was only on the second level of the hotel, I didn't have a very wide angle or zoomed out shot that I could put together.  I decided to try it anyway and took several photos with multiple different exposure times from 1/30th second all the way to 30 seconds, just seeing what the difference did on the people walking around and the feel of the picture in general.

I ended up deciding on using a photo with one of the quicker shutter speeds (1/30 - 1/15 second) in order to somewhat freeze the movement of the people on the street.  There is still some blurring and visible movement, but for the most part, the people are still defined.

From there, I used a technique that I looked up on-line to mimic the tilt-shift style and applied the effect to the photo and this is the result. 

Let me know what you think.

T.

Follow up:

I went back in to the image and tweaked the blur to lower it a little bit.  I think that it looks better this way.  Let me know what you think.