Photography

Example?

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.

Get very far away with a very long lens. It's controlling perspective... the closer you are to something the larger it appears. If you are very close to something and the background is very far away that something will appear much larger than the background. If you get very far away so that the object is closer to the background that it is to you (relatively), they will appear to be closer in scale. But when you get far away you need a longer focal length lens to zoom in. This work on any scale from small objects to the moon (though with the moon you have to get a good mile or so away with an insanely large lens)