This simple camera trick magically turns a toy car into your luxury dream ride

Use forced perspective to make a small car look large — 1/160sec, f/16, ISO400, aperture priority, highlight metering (Image credit: Wendy Evans)

Forced perspective is a camera trick that makes small things appear much larger or smaller than they really are. Filmmaker Peter Jackson didn’t magically make Elijah Wood and his friends smaller in The Lord of the Rings; he just shot it so they appeared smaller (or so that Gandalf looked bigger).

You can use the same idea to make a toy sports car appear as if it’s the real thing, like one you’d buy after having a big win on the lottery.

The first thing to do is create your base for the car to sit on, but there are some things to note. If it’s going to replace the foreground, you can depict it however you want. But if you’re going to blend it into parts of the foreground, making it the same color and texture are essential.

Setting it up

This is the actual size of the car and base (Image credit: Wendy Evans)

1) Size of the car
The size of your toy car will determine how hard or easy this project is. This is a remote control car that’s about 25cm long. Bear in mind that the bigger the car, the larger the base you need to create for it.

2) Lining the edges up
The idea is to get down low enough so you can line up the back edge of the base with the edge of the scenery in the background. You want to replace the foreground, then smoothly continue on to the greenery.

3) The table
Place the base and car on a table or raised platform so that you can get the angle just right. Too high or too low, and it’s hard to get the perspectives to line up. This is a small table, so I needed to crouch to get the best angle.

4) The background
Find either an interesting or natural-looking background that looks like it would have a road in front of it. You couldn’t set this up in the middle of a field, for example. Using a car park, like here, is ideal.

5) The foreground
Ideally, you are going to replace all of this with the base of your project, but if it doesn’t quite fit then be prepared to blend your base with the actual foreground in post-production. Having them the same color and texture helps.

Step by step: Setting up the shot

1) Create the base

Create the base so that it matches where you are going to shoot (Image credit: Future)

I’d suggest using a thin piece of plywood. I initially used card, but the glue made it warp. Cover the base in water-based glue and sprinkle scenery gravel over it. Then paint on lines or markings. You can get all these items in arts and crafts stores or model shops, particularly those that sell train sets.

2) Set the exposure mode

Set the exposure mode to control the depth of field (Image credit: Future)

You’ll want to select a narrow aperture for this project, so set the camera to aperture priority mode. You can set up your camera on a tripod, depending on where you are, but if you don’t have one, you may need to increase the ISO to ensure there is no camera shake.

3) Metering the scene

Metering for backlit scenes (Image credit: Future)

For the first set of shots, I used center-weighted metering. However, because there wasn’t much light in the foreground and plenty in the background, the shots were overexposed. For subsequent attempts, I used highlight metering to retain the highlights.

4) Depth and focus

Generating the right amount of depth of field is key (Image credit: Future)

Focus on the part of the car nearest to the camera and use an aperture such as f/16 to ensure that the background retains plenty of detail. I could have chosen f/22 to include more detail overall, in a slightly softer image, but this proved to be the better combination.

Scale and space

For the first attempt at this project, I used some small metal cars that were around 4-5cm in length. I created the base, leaving plenty of space for the cars, measured the gaps and painted in some white lines to indicate parking spaces.

However, it didn’t work because they were too small – so I had to get extremely close to make them look large, which would have required a macro lens. That made getting the background in focus and lining the base up with it impossible.

For the second attempt, I used a remote-controlled car that was about 25cm long. This time, it worked perfectly.

The original attempt used small cars... but they were too small — The original attempt used small cars… but they were *too* small (Image credit: Future)

It became impossible to get enough detail into the background (Image credit: Future)

Before you go...

To shoot a scene like this you need crop sensor camera like a Nikon Z fc, a tripod so you can use a narrow aperture, and maybe some portable lighting to brighten the foreground.

Wendy was the Editor of Digital Photo User for nearly five years, charting the rise of digital cameras and photography from expensive fad to mass market technology. She is a member of the Royal Photographic Society (LRPS) and while originally a Canon film user in the '80s and '90s, went over to the dark side and Nikon with the digital revolution. A second stint in the photography market was at ePHOTOzine, the online photography magazine, and now she's back again as Technique Editor of Digital Camera magazine, the UK's best-selling photography title. She is the author of 13 photography/CGI/Photoshop books, across a range of genres.