Good for: Making full-size objects look miniature
Think of your camera as a shrink ray, able to reduce large land masses and buildings to tiny scale models of themselves. Creating a miniaturized look used to require a special tilt-shift lens or Photoshop work, but Olympus's latest Micro Four-Thirds cameras (the Pen E-P2 and Pen E-PL1) and three new Canon PowerShots (the SX210 IS, SD1400 IS, and SD3500 IS) put access to this trickery inside the camera itself. Olympus's Diorama Art Filter and Canon's Miniature scene mode both choose a narrow horizontal plane of focus, blur the top and bottom of the image, and give colors an artificial boost. The resulting images make big objects look really small.