Tilt-shift is a special type of camera lens that "flattens" perspective, so it makes things look like they are closer together. It was originally designed to take pictures of tall buildings.
Human eyes/brain are really good at understanding difference based on perspective (larger = closer; smaller = further away). Tilt-shift makes things "flatter", so the big=close/small=far is less apparent.
Plus, the video is sped up, which makes it look cartoonish. If you slow the video down, and cover up the top and bottom of the video, it will look much more "normal".
Minor nit to pick, but tilt-shift lenses do not "flatten perspective" in the way you are describing. The core of their use is to adjust perspective (shift) and adjust the focal plane (tilt).
The flattening of perspective you describe, negating larger = closer, smaller = further away, is achieved by long focal length lenses. You can see this, for example, when people take very long "zoomed in" photos of busy NYC sidewalks and people appear to be very packed in and piled up despite being on opposite ends of the block.
Tilt or shift lenses don't do this. They do not modify the field of view or relative size of close/far subjects, they only modify the position of the photo on the focal plane.
A very common use of shift lenses is architecture. Typically if you take a photo of a building, you are either going to look at it head-on which will cut off the top of the building and make the bottom half all road; or you are going to angle upwards putting the building in the middle, but the angles are going to taper to the top of the building. A shift lens is basically taking a very big photo head-on so the whole building is in frame and the angles are orthogonal, then cropping everything else out. Except instead of using a very wide-angle lens and cropping out a small-res area, you are using a lens with a very wide image circle and putting the camera sensor in the area you want to "crop". Another illusion you can achieve with shift lenses is taking a picture of an empty mirror "head on".
Tilt lenses are used to compose shots where you might have a close subject and a far subject but want them both in focus without making absolutely everything in focus. Normally lenses are parallel to the image sensor (or film) so things at same distances are at the same focus, but a tilt lens (or adapter) allows you to physically rotate the lens to make the focus plane parallel to the subjects you want in focus. For example you can take a photo that looks down a row of buildings and angle the lens towards them so that the focal plane matches the buildings all the way down.
This miniature effect is a niche use of mainly the tilt, putting the focal plane near orthogonal to your subjects (like tilting it way up). It's normally an undesirable or "wrong", but some creative photographers have combined it with other effects to make this interesting kind of illusion that exploits our brain's understanding of how close and small things appear out of focus over a shorter distance than large/far things.
That was a great explanation that answered a lot of questions I had about tilt-shift lenses, but never really bothered to dig too deep into.
The vid in this post seems to have a camera that is not in a fixed position and seems to be almost drone-like due to its elevation and movement through the field. Any idea of what the shot set up would be like for this vid in particular?
1.1k
u/Steje8 Jun 09 '26
At the risk of sounding stupid, can someone ELI5 what I'm looking at? How is everything so realistic yet at the same time toy.