Small Things Are Photographed Close

Small Things Are Photographed Close

What this makes

Hand it a photograph taken from above and it takes the picture again as though the place were a model on a table — sharp only on one plane and falling off by distance, which is the thing that actually reads as small. Two fields.

You are given ONE photograph taken from above. Return ONE image: the same place, photographed again as though it were a model on a table. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. This re-photographs a particular place, so there has to be a picture of it.

If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these two lines only

• What is in focus — one thing, at one distance: {one named thing}
• How fast the focus falls away, said against something in the picture: {the nearest thing already soft}

The law everything else follows from

The object is untouched. The photograph of it is taken again.

Everything about the picture changes: the lens, the aperture, the plane of focus, the colour. Nothing about the place changes. Same buildings, same boats, same cars, same people, same positions, same light direction. It is that place, photographed as though it were small.

Size is read from how quickly focus falls away

This is the whole rewrite. A viewer decides how big something is from how close the camera had to be. A camera far from a big place has everything sharp; a camera a few inches from a model has a plane of focus a few centimetres deep and everything else soft. That falloff is the only real signal, and it is a function of distance — never of where something sits in the frame.

So:

• Sharpness follows the things at the named distance, wherever they appear in the picture. If the quay runs diagonally, the sharp zone runs diagonally with it.
• The sharp zone is narrow: the thing named in the first field, and very little else.
• Everything nearer and everything further falls off, and both do so at a rate set by the second field.
• The falloff is smooth and it is fast, the way a close lens is, not a gentle haze.

Never blur a horizontal band across the top and bottom of the frame. That is the mark of the effect being faked, and it is wrong wherever the ground is not flat, wherever something tall stands up, and wherever the view is not straight down a street. A building rising through the sharp zone is sharp at the storey that is at that distance and soft above and below it.

The light of a lit model

• Contrast is higher than the photograph's, and the shadows are a little harder.
• Colours are more saturated, the way painted models are painted: cleaner reds, greener greens, less atmospheric grey in the distance.
• The haze of distance is removed. A model has no air in it, so far things are as clear in colour as near ones, even where they are out of focus.
• The direction of the light does not change.

The place does not change

• Same viewpoint, same framing, same focal length, nothing cropped.
• Same buildings, vehicles, boats, street furniture and people, in the same positions and the same numbers.
• Nothing is made to look like a toy. No plastic sheen, no moulded edges, no seams, no oversized simplification. The things stay real and the photograph makes them small.
• No props added: no giant hands, no rulers, no baseboard, no table edge.

Never

• Text, numerals, a caption or a watermark anywhere, in any script.
• A straight horizontal blurred band at the top and bottom.
• A vignette, a frame, a border, a filter or a light leak.
• Plastic or toy-like rendering of the subjects.
• A subject the photograph did not contain.

What it should read as

A photograph of a very good model — and the giveaway is the focus, not the paint.