Forced Perspectives

Learn how to play with scale and force perspective to transform model cars into life-size vehicles. James Paterson gets his toy cars out

Forced perspective photography is one of the oldest visual tricks in the book, and also one of the most fun. With careful arrangement of objects in a scene, we can fool the eye by combining small and large elements into a believable whole. It also gives us the chance to play with toy cars.

This project is a prime opportunity to make use of shooting skills and Photoshop magic, as it requires a little of both. We’ll start off by setting up our model car. The height of objects plays an important role in how our eyes perceives said object in a standard image. So in order to create our illusion, we must raise the car off the ground and line it up with the scene behind.

The main hurdle we have to overcome is depth of field. We need to bring the car in very close to the lens, and the closer an object is, the less depth of field – even at the narrowest apertures the plane of focus is limited. The solution is to use focus stacking. By shooting several frames then bringing together the sharp parts, we can extend the depth of field to cover everything.

Then we put into everything together in Photoshop. As our set of images is in alignment, this should be a simple task. We can use the Auto-Blend command to focus stack our images, then combine it with the background scene and drop in our two figures using layer masks.

Top Tips Get set up to force the perspective

Learn how to set up a model car and work the angles so that it looks life-sized

01 THE CAR

The fun in this technique is making a model car look life-size. So, it’s important to use a realistic-looking model vehicle, like the famous Jaguar E-type here. If you’re looking for a similar motor, search for die-cast models. The bigger the better, so go for 1:18 scale or larger.

02 PLATFORM