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The Compression Effect in Photography
What it is and how it works
The Compression Effect
There is a wonderful effect that I have been seeing more of lately which photographers refer to as compression, or “flattening” an image. A subject is framed against a background that appears larger than life — at a scale that our eyes do not see. It is stunning — check out the following shots by @pegs4days and @alexstrohl (who is probably my favorite photographer of all time).
It appears as if the photographer has compressed the space between the subject and the background, bringing the background close to the viewer. When I first saw these sorts of pictures, I was sure that the photographer had to take two separate photos at different magnifications, and photoshop them together in post-production into a single image. As I have learned and will explain, this is not the case.
A Misconception
Up until recently, I believed that the compression effect is induced by having a larger focal length. The logic ran as the following:
I want the background in my image to be large. To view the background as…