I recently stumbled across a type of photography called tilt shift photography. This is normally achieved with an expensive specialized lense designed just for this type of photography. I am not an expert at photography, nor do I aspire to be, but I am accomplished at Photoshop and I can manipulate just about any image out there to my liking. I decided to give the tilt shift effect a run and was pretty happy with the results. All of these are not technically tilt shift. I took some liberties and messed around with the images.

Essentially what is involved in varying degrees is applying a mask with a gradient where I want the focus to be. Then I applied a gaussian blur between 10-15  pixels depending on the effect I was going for. That creates the focal point.In some instances I just applied a mask and then erased anything I wanted to be blurred. On the image of the log cabin I created a copied layer and then blurred the bottom image while the top was erased til I was happy with the result.

Next I went to the brightness/ contrast and bumped them up 20-30% til I liked the colors. Lastly I opened up curves and adjust the low end down and the high end up.

The result is an ethereal looking image that in many cases looks like a picture of a model.