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There are two wonderful things that happen when a photographer looks through a telephoto lens at a scene. Neither is natural to the human eye and in fact, probably can’t be done without the use of an external lens. One is called compression, and you’ve seen it in movies, most obviously when a character walks across the top of a hill in front of a setting sun. The sun is huge, the character appearing to be treading across its width. If the sun were actually that large compared to the person, it’s likely that the person would be incinerated, along with the hill.

What happens is fairly simple. A telephoto lens magnifies images that pass through its elements. It doesn’t matter if one thing is a quarter-mile and the other, 93 million miles away; they both get magnified by the same amount—say, seven times their apparent size.

摄影师喜欢使用的短语：zoom with your feet. This means get physically closer, stick your camera in the face of that subject. Do that with the person on the hill and he or she will get bigger. The sun will still be 92.99999 million miles away from you, so it won’t look any larger. But go back a quarter of a mile, look at the subject through a very long lens, and the personand the sun将平等放大，因为镜头刚刚蔓延光，就像打开伞一样。

It’s compression of distance, making things far away seem closer in relation to things nearer. Compression can fill a scene with colour and form in a way that the human eye can’t, no matter how fast you zoom with your feet. And that’s why a telephoto (a zoom lens for most photographers) lens is, maybe ironically, a good tool for landscape photography. Especially if you have a person or an object in front of the landscape that you want to be a centerpiece of your photo. You can wrap the scene around the person in a highly attractive manner.

当摄影师通过填充玻璃元素的长管时，摄影师眼睛的另一件事是一种减少的场景。把你的摩托车放在一个领域前面的路边，也许是一个落后一百码的三滨。把你的相机放在你的眼睛里，缩放到最大的远摄力量，留出交通，并向后走路。起初，你只会在照片中有一部分自行车，所以继续前进，直到你看到整个自行车。确保骑自行车是镜头专注的对象，并拍照。后来，当你可以看看显示器屏幕上的镜头时，请注意背景变得模糊，照片中的自行车有多突出，好像有人用蜡笔在它身边，勾勒出来。这是景深的效果 - 从遥远的地方到远离你，焦点的宽度，焦点是。它是一种可爱的效果，由摄影师一直使用，并且可以通过改变镜头上的光圈来改变它，这是一个较小的孔径，这是一个更广泛的明显景深;这就像眯着眼睛锐化你的愿景。但眯眼实际上并没有做镜头的表现。 Notice what you see when you look at the scene without the camera. Your eyes are focused on the bike, but the background? It’s not really out of focus, it’s just split into two images by your two eyes. Close one eye and try it, or hold a finger up and look at it with one eye, and notice the background; it’s just as sharp. Again, the lens is able to do things that your eyes can’t, and they are good things. It is all artifact, but it’s a good artifact.

Here’s something about depth of field that you might not know: it’s wider farther away. This means that the background will remain sharp for a greater distance behind your focussed object than the foreground in front of it. Keeping that in mind, if you want your subject to really pop out of a scene, you need to make sure the background is far away from it.

Of course, you can alter the depth of field effect by changing the aperture of the lens, but with a zoom lens, anything more than about 200 millimeters in length, depth of field will be quite narrow no matter what aperture you set. If you want to photograph a scene and keep the foreground at 10 yards from you and the background at 200 yards all in focus, you probably need to use a wider-angle lens. Keep in mind that making a single object, say a cute puppy or a handsome motorcycle, stand out in the photo will be more difficult, but if you’re shooting a valley, say, or a lake, you might want to get something close to you, a person or a motorcycle or a tree branch, to give the photo some scale, to show the close against the far.

This is all assuming that you’re using a camera that you can fit different lenses onto. If you’re shooting with your phone, your options are more limited. However, by noticing what’s in the foreground and what’s in the background, you can achieve brilliant photos with a good phone camera, a GoPro, or some other smaller camera. With some, you won’t be able to adjust an aperture and exert control over depth of field, even if what you’re using offers different lens lengths. But by positioning the camera—high or low, the object of most concern not in the middle of the image, but off to one side, either facing left or right into the photo or, in some cases, facing out of it, and filling as much of the image as you want, you can get better pictures right away.

There are other matters to discuss here: lighting (best first in the morning and last thing in the afternoon), the rule of thirds (make an x’s and o’s cross-pattern on your image and put what’s important where two lines cross), panning (shooting a motorcycle going past you and blurring the bushes on the other side of the road, and the tires, to show speed), and even ISO and use of tripods and remote controls, but that’s for another time.

Follow this rule, and your photos will improve, instantly: Look. Don’t just look at the face of the person or the gas tank of the bike, look all around the frame of your photo. Move the camera up or down, angle it side to side, so that not just the object of concern, but everything else in the image, is what you want. Really look at it, take your time, look at all of it, and compose a great photo.