Shrink photography

CityShrinker is the web site of a professional photographer who specializes in making photos of real things look like they are photos of toys. You can read about how it is done at Discover magazine's web site (from which the image is taken): "'We perceive the huge structures as miniature because of the blurring created by [an] overly shallow focus', says visual neuroscientist Ray Phinney of Wheaton College in Illinois. 'If you were actually looking at a model, your eye would be focusing at a short distance, so things closer and farther away would be blurred in a similar way,' he says. Phinney adds that the naturally bright, washed-out look of the images cinches the trick—the loss of detail makes objects seem even more model-like."