Tilt-Shift Faking

I learned something new today. It is called Tilt-Shift (TS) photography. Here is what a TS lens looks like, pretty crazy stuff. The problem is that these lenses cost upwards of $1000, which makes me sad because the make really neat pictures. You can use it to remove perspective distortion (how buildings have angled lines that intersect at infinity), you can make a really trippy miniature model look(Link), and you can accent different parts of the picture, by 'pushing' the eye away from the parts of the picture you want them to ignore (people don't like looking at blurry stuff). So, back to the $1000 problem- I'm not going to spend that much on a specialty lens like this, no way- in comes digital post-processing. This Flickr discussion tells you how to reproduce this effect using the Gimp (Photoshop can be used as well, but again, not spending $500 for software). I unfortunately don't have many people in the city type of pictures to try the miniature effect out, but here is a side by side comparison of the Adonis picture from earlier this year.