Web site emerges as networking tool for amateur photographers

Look at some of Enoch Lai’s photos, which he avidly posts on the Web site Flikr.com, and you may be confused. One of Lai’s pictures appears to be of model houses on a river. Maybe. Or is it of the riverside in Austin, Texas?

Now look at some of Karen Rodgers’ photos. One in particular appears to be of the river running through Ottawa. Or is it an elaborate diorama?

Both photos play with similar techniques: One part of the picture is in sharp focus, the rest is slightly blurry. The technique, historically achieved with a tilt-shift camera lens, has become increasingly popular in the growing community of amateur photographers who network with each other on Flickr.

Lai adjusted a normal picture of Austin with Photoshop to make it appear like a tilt-shift photo; the real houses seem like toy models. Rodgers used tilt-shift techniques to take a picture of a public diorama of Ottawa.

Both were inspired by Flickr, which is emerging as an important networking and inspirational tool for amateur photographers, much like MySpace has done for amateur musicians and YouTube for amateur filmmakers.

Flickr has seen immense growth since its start two years ago and has a current membership of some 3 million. There are 122 million uploaded photos, 80 percent of which are shared publicly.

“Flickr has given me a lot of good ideas,” said Lai, 23, a network technician at the University of Texas in Austin. “As a community, Flickr really challenges you. There are always new photos with new photographic elements.”

Rodgers, 38, a retired public servant in Ottawa, agrees. “It’s kind of like a big library of photo techniques,” she said of Flickr.

The Web site was founded in 2004 and was purchased last year by Yahoo for $35 million.

Flickr makes it easy for users to find photos they’re interested in by “tagging” them — labeling each one with various words that describe it. Rodgers’ photo of the Ottawa bridge, for instance, is tagged with “model” and “Ottawa” so that it will pop up when people type in either word.

Lai’s photo of Austin is tagged with “Austin,” “Mount Bonnell,” “houses,” “suburb” and “tilt-shift,” the last of which leads to the 2,799 photos that are an explicit part of the tilt-shift craze on Flickr.

This craze helped Flickr achieve a networking success reminiscent of MySpace. Hamish Grant, a 35-year-old professional photographer in Toronto, made friends from the community of photographers attempting the tilt-shift effect.

A number of people “leave comments, e-mail me, and when we realize we’re both in Toronto, we hook up to become shooting buddies,” Grant said. “It’s a lot of fun. Flickr has become a community for me.”

Flickr, which also provides the opportunity for local meet-ups, is perhaps unique in connecting people through a shared interest in a photographic technique. Tilt-shift is probably the trendiest technique on the site.

“I liked the idea of making big things look small and small things look big,” said Rodgers of why the tilt-shift effect appeals to her. She’s more interested in how the photo is “not a reflection of reality, but instead of one person’s reality.”

The tilt-shift effect plays a trick on the eye, said Eric Verspoor, another amateur on Flickr from Toronto. He recalls a morning he took a picture out of his bedroom window, then loaded it onto his computer.

“I opened up that image, and it was exactly the way I saw it through my own eyes,” said Verspoor, 28, a graphic designer. “I applied the tilt-shift technique.” The finished product was striking. “Intellectually, you know it is a full-size shot, but it really fools your brain into seeing it as a miniature.”

The amateurs on Flickr are not completely divorced from the professional photographers who have experimented with the tilt-shift technique. The most famous are Toni Hafkenscheid and Olivo Barbieri. Hafkenscheid grew up in the Netherlands, and the train sets and miniature landscapes that he played with as a child seemed to him to be artificial and fake. When he started his photography career in the United States and Canada, he wanted “to capture that artificial landscape.”

Another photographer cited by several Flickr users is Lori Nix of Kansas, who creates elaborate dioramas and then uses a tilt-shift camera to make them look almost real. One of her sets, “Accidentally Kansas,” is a series of photos showing her Kansas home being overwhelmed by calamities like floods, toxic spills, lightning and crashing vehicles.

Nix spends months to years working on her dioramas, all of which are just a foot or two in diameter. She uses toothpicks, ceramics and other materials to create the realistic models and uses techniques familiar to tilt-shift photographers — including choosing only several points of sharp focus and careful lighting — to make the fake look real.

The use of Photoshop to make otherwise normal pictures look like a tilt-shift adds another layer of uncertainty to the photos; the viewer doesn’t know if the photo was manipulated through lenses or Photoshop, let alone whether it is real or a diorama.

“It’s kind of a good thing to have these periodic visual shakeups,” Rodgers said. “These experimentations are like invitations to try new things.”