system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does a “tilt-shift" effect make a picture look like a miniature scene?
gpt
Imagine two scenarios:

* A: a real-life city with tall buildings, photographed by a drone and
* B: a miniature version of the same city, photographed from the same angle to look roughly the same as A.

In A, everything would be sharp, because everything is far away from the camera.

In B, you could focus on the top of the buildings, making the streets blurry, because the tops of the buildings are so very close to the camera (because it's a miniature and you had to go very close to it).

Try it out with your eyes: hold your finger close to your eye and look at it. The stuff behind it will be very blurry. Now look at something further away. The stuff behind it won't be nearly as blurry.

So what if you take a wide angle shot of a big, real-life city, and make the tops of the buildings sharp and the street blurry? Well, you can "cheat" and trick your mind into thinking that it's tiny. That's it.

You can do this in Photoshop or you can do it with a tilt-shift camera. The two will result in a very similar effect in this particular example.