One of the creative problems inherent in all photographs is that they’re flat.
Photographs exist in only two dimensions–they have height and width, but no depth. While a landscape may spread across miles, your photographs are only as deep as the paper they’re printed on. The lack of a third dimension means it’s up to you to create a believable illusion of distance in your photographs.
Creating A Sense of Depth
While you can’t get such intense a three-dimensional experience from an ordinary photograph, there are some visual tricks (also known as “depth cues”) you can exploit to enhance the sensation of distance in your photographs. Knowing how depth is created is particularly useful in landscape photographs because one of the things you’re trying to relate is the physical space involved.
Linear Perspective
One of the simplest and most direct ways to create a sense of distance in a landscape is to include a leading line, a cue that artists refer to as linear perspective. Lines work best when they start near the front edge of the image and go to the far horizon (as in the desert highway photo) and conclude at a single point (“one point” perspective). Highways, fences, rivers, and telephone poles are all things that can take the eye on a deep journey into your image.
Lines are like a siren call to the eye and they beg the eye to follow. It’s hard to look at a photograph that includes a strong lead-in line and not trace its path–it’s the visual equivalent of eating just one potato chip–tough to do!When these lines are combined with what’s calledl a “single vanishing point” the depth illustion gets even stronger. The vanishing point is created whenever all of the lines in a scene appear to be focsed on a single spot in the distance.