Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Pull background forward (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by TheBigTypoon@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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What is the trick people use to pull the background closer to the foreground, when there's a linear division between the two, and a subject in the middle?

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[–] Slugnan@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

You're describing compression. It's basically perspective distortion caused by the distance between your camera and the subject. It's most apparent when using long focal lengths and close subject distances, however it is a common misconception that the compression is actually caused by the focal length - it isn't.

For example, if you take the same photo of your subject with a 24mm lens and a 200mm lens, both from 10 feet away, the 200mm photo is going to give you the "compressed" look, however if you cropped the 24mm photo to match the framing of the 200mm photo, you would see that the two frames are identical (minus the obvious quality loss from the crop), so the focal length is not responsible for the compression. The 200mm lens is basically giving you a 'lossless' crop of the same image as the one taken with the 24mm lens in this example. This extremely narrow field of view is what gives the photo the compressed look that you're after, making background elements appear enlarged or closer to your subject.