Toronto Through Google Maps Street View: May 2010

Friday, May 21, 2010

Tilt Shift Toronto

There's a new thing out there called tilt-shift photography, where images or videos of normal life-sized things are made to look like miniatures. It's impressive when done well, and it seems to have entirely to do with altering the focus of the foreground and background, so that things nearer to or further from the eye get blurrier than you'd expect. There is a website, called http://tiltshiftmaker.com/, that will turn any picture you upload into a tilt-shift picture. With the ones I tried, it did... well, not a great job, but good enough that you can get a sense of the effect in action. I took five pictures that I've already uploaded from Google Maps in other entries on this blog, and subjected them to the focus of that particular website. Here they are:

Union Station:

Casa Loma:

Tim Hortons, Mount Pleasant Rd.

Victoria Park TTC Station:

Hockey Hall of Fame:

Yonge and Finch:

It's this last one I like best. Little dinky cars... I might do this again some time. It's not perfect, but it was a fun attempt. Clicking on any pictures will make them bigger, of course.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

A Journey Down Yonge St., part 2: York Region

This is part two, so you should really click here to get the full story.

This is the story of a street - one that has delusions of grandeur about being the longest in the world, but one that is far from tiny. In Part 1, we followed Yonge as it divided Toronto into east and west. Now we take it north of Steeles into the georgaphically much larger York Region. Through Thornhill and Richmond Hill, through Aurora, Newmarket, and places whose names I forget and have never been to in my life...

26. YONGE & CLARK