What I did: I stumbled across this CNN Style article of photographer Amey Kandalgaonkar and her Gotham-esque art deco photos of Shanghai. I was captivated by the surreal and cinematic quality of the photographs, and was curious to see if I could replicate some of her effects on a day in Philadelphia.
What worked: In order to manipulate perspective and make the buildings feel larger than life, I used Photoshop to straighten the edges. I used distortion transform to create a perspective reminiscent of what a tilt-shift lens would look like by making the buildings look somewhat orthographic. This worked particularly well on the first shot, but I think it had mixed results on the remaining few shots.
What didn't work: Some of the compositions were not quite as compelling, especially the last one. I could have further pushed the editing on some images to match the surreal quality of Amey's work such as removing the advertising on the white building. Overall, the images definitely have an artificial quality to them but I think it works out in this case.
General thoughts: This was a pretty fun experiment to undertake as I haven't tried editing in this style before. I've used some techniques involved like this before, but these combine composition and editing in a way that I feel captures miniature worlds that you wouldn't notice while walking around a city. This gives me plenty of ideas for future series' that I could try out.