PXN8, an online image editor. The neatest thing about this tool is that you can edit Flickr images directly – without having to download them to your desktop, upload them to PXN8, download the edited image and re-upload to Flickr. Pure class.

EyeOS, a web-based operating system. Pretty neat, though it’s getting heavily Dugg at the moment. I’m not sure how useful it is either, although I suppose you get access to your files anywhere (as long as you save them within EyeOS). And yes, it does come with a browser, of sorts. Plus MP3 player and games.

Before…

After…

I came across a tutorial that explains how to make fake tilt-shift photographs. I used it to knock up this pic of my back garden. Looks like a model, doesn’t it?

I’ve been trawling the net trying to figure out what Tilt/Shift is, exactly, and how it works. As far as I can make out, it works by tilting the plane of sharp focus so that it is no longer parallel to the film/CCD but runs from right-to-left or left-to-right slightly (depending on which way the lense is tilted). This is the tilt part and the net result is that instead of the plane of sharp focus being from near to far, it is also from left-to-right or right-to-left slightly.

The shift part of the equation allows you to correct the perspective of the photograph. If you take a photograph of a tall building from ground-level with a normal lense, the top of the building will appear smaller than the bottom (duh). A tilt/shift lense allows you to shift the lense upwards slightly (above the camera’s focal plane), thus correcting the perspective and reducing the converging lines effect. Have a look at the pics of Notre Dame in this Wikipedia article for an example of what I mean.

Both of these techniques have uses in landscape and architectural photography they can also be used to make real world scenes look like models. The technique that I used to make the image above is a cheat, but it does the job!