Model Photography... ;-)

Is it real or is it a model.?.. Someone with far too much time on their hands or trickery...

Well....... its real but it looks like a model don't you think..? This effect can be done quite easily if you happen to own a Tilt and Shift lens... which I imagine none of us do, because its used mainly in architectural photography to handle perspective issues which normally arise when you point you camera up in the air to take a picture of your favourite building and find out when you look and the image afterwards that it looks like its falling over or that it has slopey sides... anyway I digress... what in reality your doing with this type of lens is controlling the plane of focus... but the interesting thing is we can also fake it digitally...

Go here and here for step by step tutorials (They are for Photoshop so I'll leave Manuel to tell us how to do it in Gimp), the only thing that I would recommend is that you take your original image from above the subject as this is how you normally look at one of these types of models, and that it is well lit, so that you can pump up the saturation to give it that kind of smooth plasticky look... all adding to the illusion...

If you like the idea, check out these examples, some of which you'll have a hard time believing that they are not models.!.