This feature is kind of misleadingly named. It is claimed to give the image a feel of what the old 1960’s-era Japanese Monster movies used to look like – the giant monsters were actually miniatures filmed in a certain way that exaggerated the shallow depth-of-field, trying to make it look like it would normally look had the monster actually been monster-sized.
So all this feature does is selectively apply the soft-focus function demonstrated earlier to all but 1/3rd of the image, plus it exaggerates color intensity to an unreal degree. And to help you compose properly, the camera will show you which 1/3rd of the image will be sharp while you’re shooting in this mode.
Now you might think that this is a pointless feature, but don’t dismiss it out of hand. This feature was just made for Instagram. In fact, there’s also an entire series of lenses (called Lensbaby www.lensbaby.com) designed to help you do something just like this (though much more and with much better control over what is in focus).
Figure 6-63 provides an example of Miniature Mode in action. Personally, I would have liked it more if it was possible to steer a dot (for want of a better word) around the screen and selectively choose what I wanted to be in focus – using much the same methodology as zooming in a picture in playback mode or when using Manual Focus Assist (Section 7.2) to manually focus before taking a picture.
