Make objects larger in a photo

<p>I was wondering what methods are there for making background objects in a <strong>wide</strong> shot larger?</p>

<p>With an SLR is it only possible with a telephoto from far away (to achieve the same composition as the wide)? </p>

<p>I heard of something in Large format photography involving tilting the rear to manipulate object size, this is a feature specific to those cameras I believe and tilting the front I assume does not achieve the same results, correct?</p>

<p>Thanks for your comments.</p>

<p>Could you link to an example photo of the effect you need?<br>

It sounds to me like shifting (often mentioned together with tilt, because both involve movements of the lens versus the film/sensor plane), but I'm not quite sure.</p>

<p>didn't really have a photograph in mind, i was just thinking in which ways I could shoot a landscape for example that would allow me to get a large vista but not have everything tiny.</p>

<p>like keeping elements such as a moon or mountains in the backdrop from looking miniscule.</p>

<p>Hello Hello Hello (sorry, couldn't resist). It sounds like you don't actually want a wide shot. If you're using a wide lens to fit your subject in, it'll make the background look small. If you want the background larger, you need a longer lens. If you want to fit something in the frame and also have the background enlarged, you need to use a long lens, but move further from your subject. If you've seen images of a person's head silhouetted against a full moon, for example, that's done by using a very long lens, but with the photographer a long way away from the person. (Or by combining the foreground and background in Photoshop, of course.) Changing lens focal length only changes the field of view - the only way to change the relationship between elements in the image is to move the camera.<br />

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A shift lens, or shifting the focal plane with a view camera, will let you change the effects of perspective distortion - you can effectively enlarge one end of the frame differently from the other end. I doubt that's really the solution to your problem, though. I hope that helps.</p>

You can't do it. Using a wide angle lens is similar to stepping further back to include more in the frame. Things in the distance get smaller as you move back.

<p>I saw a photo recently which despite being taken with a telephoto lens still had a small background behind a bird nesting on the ground. The thought struck me that since there was an obvious separation between the nest and the background it would have been so much nicer if he had selected out the background and enlarged it .... but since it was the winning photograph in its section I kept my mouth shut :-)</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"...a landscape for example that would allow me to get a large vista but not have everything tiny... like keeping elements such as a moon or mountains in the backdrop from looking miniscule."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>If you're referring to those photos with unusually large moons over a landscape, it can't be done without some trickery. The photos you've seen where the moon appears larger in relation to the landscape than you'd see in real life are done with visual tricks. With film, it's done with double exposures on a single frame, or by overlaying a photo of the moon onto the blank sky over a landscape. With digital some cameras can handle the old double exposure trick but it's usually done more easily with editing.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.weatherscapes.com/techniques.php?cat=miscellaneous&page=doubleexp">Here's a link to a page that describes some of the common techniques</a>.</p>

<p>Lex - it <i>can</i> be done, with a long enough lens (or in <a href="http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081212.html">this case</a> a telescope) - but the more extreme cases certainly cheat. Part of the problem is depth of field - I've tried having a moon in the background of a portrait (which wasn't that big even at 500mm), and it's very hard to get enough depth of field even at small apertures. I ended up taking two photos from the same place, and replaced the fuzzy moon with a sharp one.<br />

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James - the point is that using a wide angle lens <i>isn't</i> like stepping back. Or it is, but the foreground "comes with you". If you're next to a person, they look big; if you're half a mile away, they look small. Half a mile doesn't make much difference to how big the moon looks. If you're just after large bits of scenery (a single mountain rather than an entire range) rather than something only about half a degree across (like the moon), a less exotic telephoto lens is an option, and you don't need to resort to Photoshop - not that I think there's anything wrong with a bit of creative cheating, so long as it doesn't look too fake. Of course, if you step back to get the perspective you need an fall off a cliff, you may think more fondly about the electronic solution...</p>

<p>Just to pick up a point in the article Lex linked, you certainly can't take a photo of a moonlit landscape and still have the correct exposure for detail in the moon, any more than you can show detail in the sun while still exposing the landscape in day time. If you do want to do this, you have to cheat, as the article shows (unless you're extremely lucky about some cloud dimming the moon for you, or you want to get heavy with a graduated filter). However, the moon isn't just up at night - one of the most famous landscape photographs in photography, Ansel Adams's "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" relied on this fact. A moon in a sunlit scene can often be exposed quite well.<br />

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Mountains tend to be less troublesome, of course. :-)</p>

Take a look at this photo by Richard Watson.

 

http://www.photo.net/photo/10587275

 

Obviously it was taken with a long telephoto. I also suspect it was cropped and enlarged or else he would have had to use a 2400mm lens. Still, one could have taken the same shot with with a normal or wide angle lens. One would have had a lot of buildings, foreground and trees, etc. in the shot with the moon and plane only being about 1/10th of an inch on the sky. The plane still would have looked about the diameter of the moon in that 1/10th inch section.

Then one could have cropped out that 1/10th inch section and blown it up to get the same photo that Mr. Watson got, except with a lot of grain/digital artifacts and softness. (The old "a telephoto lens does not compress any more than a normal or wide angle lens" argument.)

 

But, if you want to take a photo of the buildings, foreground and trees etc. and have the moon and plane look that large in the sky without double exposure or Photoshop, there is no lens that you can do that.

<p>There is a technique in cinematography referred to as a dolly zoom (or push-pull or smash-zoom or the Vertigo Effect... take your pick) first pioneered by Hitchcock in the movie Vertigo, that does a very good job of demonstrating the effects of visual compression. By moving away from your subject while zooming, it shows how the apparent relationship between your subject and their surroundings changes. The same holds true for still photography. By moving further from your subject and zooming to maintain the ratio of frame they occupy, you are able to manipulate the scale of your subject's surroundings without affecting the scale of your subject. Here are a couple of examples.</p>

<p>The effect is subtle in this one...<br>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxu3q1fgVPw&feature=related<br>

...and profound in this one...<br>

<p>So, the answer to your question is that it requires the proper conditions and technique. First, you need a telephoto lens, then you need the space, subject, and a distant background element to make it all work. Practice, practice, practice.<br /> <img src="http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r34/F1Addict/Miscellaneous%20Crap/IMG_0635_pn550.jpg" alt="" /></p>

<p> </p>

<blockquote>But, if you want to take a photo of the buildings, foreground and trees etc. and have the moon and plane look that large in the sky without double exposure or Photoshop, there is no lens that you can do that.</blockquote>

 

<p>Or, to put it another way, no lens will do that for you, only changing your position will. (From the right position, <i>any</i> lens will maintain the size relationship between foreground and background - the focal length of the lens just determines the field of view with a given camera.) If you want the moon to look as big as the foreground, you need to get far enough away from the foreground that it's as small as the moon - then use a long lens to make everything big again. Not magic, but inconvenient, at least if you want to talk to the people you're photographing.<br />

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On the other hand, if you want to control the relative sizes of more than two things in the frame (and apologies, James, if this was your point), cheating with multiple exposures is pretty much your only option.</p>

<p>great responses! <br>

So it is as I thought concerning the use of a telephoto. For a moment I thought I was missing something.</p>

<p>Having no experience with view cameras, how does rear tilting relate then?</p>

Rear tilting of a view camera is used to preserve parallel lines when the camera is pointed up or sideways. A rectangular building will look wider at the bottom than at the top when the camera is pointed up, the sides of the building converge in at the top. Tilting the back of the camera so it is parallel to the building will cause the top of the building to be as wide as the bottom of the building, the sides of the building will be parallel to the sides of the print. There will be no converging of the sides of the building at the top. You get a nice rectangular building not a trapezoid or a building that looks like it is falling backwards.<P>

 

An example of side tilt:<P>

 

<center><img src="http://jdainis.com/viewc1.jpg"><BR>

 

<img src="http://jdainis.com/viewc2.jpg"><P></center><P>

 

The camera position was not changed at all. Only the back was tilted sideways to get the lines of the window parallel. When the camera back is parallel to the window, the lines of the window will be parallel.

<p>James - I just wanted to say that's a really cool example, and the best demonstration I've seen. As a smaller format shooter contemplating large format, thank you!</p>

<p>I can see it clearly, thank you!</p>