How To Give Your Images An Infinite Feel

Despite the pretentious-sounding title, this isn't nearly as high-brow as it sounds. It is, in effect, a way of cropping a picture in a way that makes part of the photo look as if it could go on forever. It gives a great feeling of space and can make your pictures more exciting and dynamic.

You can use a compact or SLR, such as Nikon's D5200 or D800, for this technique and it doesn't have to be anything special. I've used wide angle and telephoto lenses to achieve the effect, although it's usually easier to isolate subjects with a longer lens, which can also have the benefit of flattening perspective, adding to the effect. It's much more important to simply use your eyes.

It's all about excluding what you don't need – whether it's the top of a mountain, to give an accentuated feeling of height, or the edge of a field, lake, etc, to give an impression of space. My photos of a jetty at Ullswater show the effect.

The first picture – the jetty, reflections and the fell across the lake – make a good landscape picture, but the second picture, going in closer for a tighter crop (which did involve walking forwards as well as simply zooming), excludes both the sky and the reflection of the sky, produces a simpler picture, with a vastly improved feeling of infinite space.

By cropping still tighter however, the third picture removes even the far shore, resulting in a jetty extending into infinite reflections, producing the most abstract yet powerful image of the three.



When photographing fields, even small ones, by ensuring that the perimeter of the fields extend outside the edge of the frame, it creates the impression of great size.

It's not just in the landscape where the infinite can be emphasised either as the same effect can be achieved with buildings as well.

So get out and really use your eyes to exclude what you don't need to give a real feeling of "to infinity and beyond".

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