"Tilt-Shift miniature faking is a creative technique whereby a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated to give an optical illusion of a photograph of a miniature scale model."
I was attempting to make a photo of the Oriskany look like a miniature model diorama. Oh well, it was my first attempt.
The houses and railway look great, its more as if getting your photographs to look cartoon, high light and low light colours and keep most things that would blur in focus as most large objects would simply be too large to allow the photo to be close up and crisp, on your original photo I thought the waves are not quite right, then I began to notice the amount of rigging, then sailors, and before I got to carried away I then read your thread, I don't feel that Jim, Peter,Kym will be out of their model job just yet, nevertheless a good idea, and me being me I'd like you to pick a subject ie destroyer comes to mind, take several photo's and then submit them, just to see how many people say how good the model is, its a laugh in't it.
To be quite blunt, both photographs are rather poor quality, my suspicion therefore would suggest both are real, if on the other I had to pick one, it would be the top photo, but I'll go with my gut feeling, both real photographs.
Oh yes oh yes oh yes ------ so where's my cigar ! back on the more serious note of the original question in hand, I can see where these types of photographs could go, it will either make peole go "WOW" or "Its a fake" unless you're caught out and asked to show your model in the flesh so to speak, someone could have a field day with this system.
It's very easy to tell the lower photo has been deliberately doctored to make it look like a macro photo of a small model. The perpetrator missed the top of the tree on the nearer shore when he attempted to mimic the shallow depth of field that is commonly seen in inexpert macro photography of small scale models. So although the top of the tree on the nearer shore is effectively the same distance from the camera as the near shore, one is sharp and yet the other is blurry. This is an absolutely certain optical give away that the photo is not a real macro image of a small scale model, but a product of deceptive manipulation. The same optical depth of field inconsistency is also manifest in the funnel of the boat. The funnel of the boat is blurry while the rest of the boat is sharp, despite the fact that the two are at essentially the same distance from camera and should therefore have shared similar level of sharpness. This photo is easy to bust as a photoshop forgery.
By comparison, the other upper photo doesn't seen to contain any actual optical dead giveaways about its authenticity. I had to guess whether there are anyone skilled enough to produce the details and the water to create such a model, and to create the proper lighting to make it look so natural.
Assessing the impact of new area rug under modeling table.