SF, the model city, uploaded by mathowie.

Barbieri’s stunning photography, which I posted about in January, uses an expensive tilt-shift lens to make aerial photography look like photos of models rather than the real thing. But you can fake the same effect through Photoshop; here’s a tutorial. People are trying it with their own photos, with mixed results: see this Boing Boing post and this Flickr group.

Update (3/02): The Virtual Earth blog has an item about doing this with Virtual Earth’s bird’s-eye imagery.