Earlier this month I had a post here about Olivo Barbieri and his photos of real places, styled to look like miniature models. He uses a specialized camera and helicopter to work his magic. It got me wondering what could be done with Birds Eye Images. Then out of the blue I find this thread on Boing-Boing that featured a tutorial from Christopher Phin illustrating how to take a 'normal' photo and apply the tilt-shift effect in Photoshop. Hmmm... If only I had some photoshop skillz, I'd love to try this out with BE imagery.

What's the next best thing to actually having Photoshop Skillz? having friends that do :-) Greg Perez and David Adam Edelstein are two talented designers here at Microsoft. I pointed them at the tutorial and off they went. Their early results are absolutely stunning. I've attached a few pics here, but click their names above to visit their flickr and blog sites to check out more of their stuff.

Christophers tutorial is pretty easily adapted to whatever bitmap editing software you might have, so have at it and post your own Birds Eye miniatures here.