Making a (digital) scale model

If you think that this is a picture of a scale model, think again. It it the real thing (an aerial view of Sydney).
I came across a picture on flickr that really looked just like a model – an impressive one, with infinite detail. I was curious and amazed. Who could pack so much detail in a scale model. As it turns out it was a digital picture that had simply been photoshop’ed. This lead me to search for other pictures with the tag fake and find a tutorial that explains how to do it. I must say that it is very addictive – I’ve done quite a few with more or less success since stumbling on this tutorial. I’ve enclosed a couple of my better examples.

The original picture of Sydney was provided courtesy of Isabelle.