Idaho Airships, Inc.

Here’s another “miniaturized” (actually, I did nothing to the aspect-I simply messed with the Depth of Field) aerial-this one of the new Boise (Gowen Field) Air Traffic Control Tower.

This is an especially intriguing subject for the effect because of its shape and the homogeneity of the background/context. ‘Nuff said.

This isn’t as easy as it looks-in fact, the render took about two hours on a very fast workstation. The effect isn’t provide by simply applying a graduated Gaussian Blur-it’s generated by a Photoshop plug-in with a wide variety of parameters designed to mimic actual exacerbation of the Circle of Confusion (the thing/s that actually makes for focal blur). Note that specular highlights have a much different blur character than features of lower luminance.

To apply the effect I generated a Mask in Photoshop:

The mask is accurate to the railings, antennae, and wires. To be more realistic I should have graduated the black portion of the mask up the tower more gradually-the background doesn’t fall off as quickly as the mask suggests, but I wanted the tower to “pop” aggressively.

L