This is my faux tilt-shift treatment of Cherokee Ranch near Sedalia, CO (via some Lightroom antics). Sorta looks like a miniature model, no? And it got me thinking of how I could be using tilt-shift lens during certain situations.
And not only for weddings. The t-s fad is certainly the fad of choice among wedding photographers now; and like with all fads, they fade. F-a-s-t. One person popularizes it because he does it really well. The herd copies him because it looks cool. Thing is, it's so easy to make it look bad.
Tilt-shift group portraits today is what texture layers were in 2008. Already in 2011, adding layers of textures onto a romantic, sweet image looks dated. It takes a very subtle touch to make the original picture look that much better, because the greatness in an image was laid in stone the moment the photographer clicked that shutter. (Which is why now, any textures you see in wedding photography is super-subtle, like microscopic traces of sand, and that's it.)
Spontaneous thought: will photography eventually run out of optical illusions and chromatic gimmicks? I mean, will someone have to introduce ultraviolet photography into their wedding collections in order to separate from the herd? This makes the future of photography really exciting.
For now, with some adventures I have coming up in the next few weeks, a little tilt-shift action will work nicely. Nothing new for the industry, but new for me. Stay tuned.
