I read somewhere that if you take a photo of an object, preferably with a detailed background and foreground, then blur everything except the subject and the area close to it, it gives the effect of a highly detailed model.... OK it's a fairly pointless excercise but I thought I'd give it a try.....

Hey that's a great trick Mick, and it certainly works based on the image you posted - The only problem now is that I'm going to have to learn how to blur areas of a photograph using PhotoShop!

Unless you want to tell us exactly how you did it, and what software was used?

Regards
Eddy

Hi PD's......I wouldn't call this a trick Eddy.........just a technical method way of enhansing the 'subject' & deminishing the visual importance or aspect of the 'back ground'

Betta tell us hou do it Mick....or you will be in big bloody trouble    ....Derek

I knew how to do that with an 4x5 studio camera, but please tell how with current equipment?
Regards,
Gerald

Lovely effect Mick - could save me having to build any models!

Stuart

Well, the correct (is there such a thing?) way is to use a 'tilt-shift' lens on an SLR camera. This has a very narrow depth of field so once you have your subject in focus, pretty much everything else will be blurred - looks like using a macro setting on, say, a model railway...
What I did was took that picture with my digital cam and opened the photo in Paintshop Pro then manually blurred everything except the tug and some of the water around it using the retouch tool (pointing finger) by opening the control panel (icon that looks like a hi-fi amplifier) and select soften, in tool controls, and adjusting the 'brush tip' controls to Shape-Round, Opacity-about 60% (60% close to the tug, 100% further out), Density-100%, Step-50%, Hardness-100% and Brush Size - about 7 pixels for up to the edge of the tug and as big as the computers memory can handle to fill the rest of the background (in my case 85 pixels, any more and the screen freezes)
There's stuff here about how to do it in Photoshop - and a spectacular example of a busy street! - http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/ 

This chap's taken it a stage further and made an animation - http://vimeo.com/5137183