ilikereadingactually

[ilikereadingactually]

The short answer is... a tilt-shift lens.

The slightly more complicated answer is... Mister Rogers.

Depth of field is the area in front and behind your chosen focus point that remains in focus and then slowly gets blurry as you get farther away.

Shallow depth of field only has a narrow slice of the image in focus and gets blurry super quick. This is caused by a large lens aperture and being close to the subject.

Deep depth of field can extend through the entire picture if your aperture is small and you are super far away.

Usually the depth of field lines up with the image sensor of your camera. So if it is tilted forward, the plane of focus matches.

The stuff outside the green area would be blurry. The edges of the green would be slightly blurry. And the dashed green line would be the sharpest area of the photo.

But the tilt-shift lens allows you to create chaos with your plane of focus. In most cases, you would use this to flatten the depth of field so you can get a 2D plane entirely in focus.

If you were to use a normal lens, the bottom left and top right would be blurry.

But with a tilt-shift lens you can do this.

The green area is taking a little nap on the floor.

However, there is an unintended side effect created by this lens. (The "Scheimpflug intersection" if you want to go down the rabbit hole.) You can choose absolutely wacky planes of focus that create a very narrow depth of field over a geographically large area.

Believe it or not, this is when psychology comes into play.

And possibly Mister Rogers.

Our only reference for such a large area having a shallow depth of field is our memories of miniatures on TV. So Mister Rogers and Thomas the Tank Engine trained our brains to see this effect as... small.

Depth of field shrinks the closer you are to something. And when filming miniatures, you are placing the lens close to the scene. But the scene represents something big in our minds. We buy the effect, but not 100%. That blurriness wouldn't be there at a regular scale. So our subconscious remembers we are watching small things pretending to be big. It just files that away in the back of our mind.

And then when we see something like this...

Our brain is all, "Look at all that tiny shit!"

Without Mister Rogers, our brains may have never made these connections and tilt-shift photography may just make us wonder why everything is all blurry. That connection to past experience is vital for this effect to be convincing.

Brains are neat.

[ilikereadingactually]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[ilikereadingactually]

Lillstugan - Ingela Kurkkio , 2023

Swedish , b. 1974 -

Watercolour , 50 x 70 cm.

[ilikereadingactually]

I didn’t realize you were the person who did the fanfiction tag drinks.

ahah yeah that's meeee!!

If you guys are interested they are all available as stickers on my RB!!

[ilikereadingactually]

[ilikereadingactually]

Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson (1847-1906) - The Morning Stars

[ilikereadingactually]

Art by Margaret Tarrant, (1888 - 1959).

[ilikereadingactually]

The Tree.

Inspired by Tolkien’s Smith of Wooten Major.

[ilikereadingactually]

“everyone interprets characters differently” unfortunately so true! thankfully I was blessed with an intense preternatural insight into their core beings (watched and paid attention) and I don’t have to worry

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[ilikereadingactually]

Rasberries spilling out from the dark from The Inland printer v.24 (1899:Oct.-1900:Mar.).

Full text here.

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[ilikereadingactually]

Good news everyone I have accidentally discovered the stupidest fucking conceivable way to make myself to do chores

It goes like this…..

-

My car: *low gas light on*

Me: I mean, I COULD stop at the gas station on the way home… OR! I could just NOT do that and deal with it tomorrow

Me: but what if I get stuck in a time loop starting tomorrow and every day I wake up and my car is on empty that would be so annoying

Me: uggghhh FINE I will stop at the gas station.

****LATER THIS EVENING:****

My sink: *has all my bowls and tea mugs in it*

Me: okay I don't actually care about this problem for tonight I am not planning on eating soup or tea

Me: …yeah but if i do end up being stuck in a time loop starting tomorrow it is going to SUCK to have only dirty tea cups in the morning forever

Me: uuuuughhhh okay clean sink it is

-

I hate this. My brain must have an extremely low opinion of me to even try it, and it worked.

But hey, I don't have to try to remember to leave 5 min early tomorrow for a gas run?

[ilikereadingactually]

LIBRARY WRAPPED

You checked out... probably some stuff? Thanks for doing that :)

Used our wifi maybe? For something?

Look we actually don't know what genres you read or how many times you renewed Gender Queer.

We don't want to know.

Our gift to you is privacy.

Take it.

Be free.

[ilikereadingactually]

 "Then the king ... ran towards Sir Mordred, crying, 'Traitor, now is thy death day come.'" Illustration by N.C. Wyeth for The Boy's King Arthur: Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Edited for Boys by Sidney Lanier (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922).

[ilikereadingactually]

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."

[ilikereadingactually]

French Novels (1888) by Vincent van Gogh