Perspective on a church

Perspective change from varying focal length and position

One of the great things I love about traveling is the opportunity to go to new places and see things I have not previously had the opportunity to enjoy.  The word "travel" is a very broad term and means many things to many different people.  It could be taken in the simplest of concepts through just leaving your house or it could encompass global relocations by car, plane, train, bike, or even foot (and any combination thereof).  There is one thing I have learned though, and that is your photographs tend to improve as you broaden your whereabouts. 
In photography, the term perspective has a specific connotation.  It refers to how the camera sees the world in front of it.  Although our eyes are built to see things in one specific way, the camera lens has the ability to change its focal length, thus altering perspective.  Focal lengths (the millimeter value that you alter on the lens to go from wide angle to telephoto) affect perspective.  A wide angle lens allows you to perceive a scene differently than a telephoto.  Most of us are really aware of how a wide angle lets you see more of something while a telephoto "zooms in" to reveal less of it but in greater detail.  What most of us don't recognize is how it affects perspective.
While mulling about in Alberta we came across this great church.  Not only was the building itself interesting, there was a small duplicate of it positioned just in front of it and off to the side.  I saw it as an opportunity to not only shoot an interesting subject, but to play with perspective.  The photo on the left was taken quite a distance from the buildings using a mild zoom lens (65 mm on a full frame camera); the one on the right with a wide angle lens (28 mm) fairly close to them.  The results speak for themselves.
Telephoto lenses cause an effect called "compression".  Backgrounds are brought up relative to foregrounds.  Notice the how the trees on the left image appear larger and closer to the buildings than the trees on the right.  The small church is clearly much smaller than the large one.  Telephotos also narrow how much background you see; the right shot indicates that another building is present whereas there is no such suggestion on the left.  Look at the large church itself.  Notice how the dome is about the same size as the front entrance on the left but is clearly smaller than on the right.
Wide angle lenses cause "distortion".  Foregrounds are made to look larger than backgrounds and distances between the two are exaggerated.  This is why portrait photographers use mild telephotos lenses to do close ups of people instead of wide angles - faces end up looking strange with large eyes and noses if low focal length values are chosen.  Notice how the larger church looks stretched out on the right; the foreground (entrance) looks larger than the tower.  The small church in front also looks larger than the one in the left photo.
I use these properties of wide and telephoto lenses when shooting to capture relationships between foregrounds and backgrounds.  Want to exaggerate a foreground feature?  Move close to it and use a wide angle lens.  Need to bring the background up relative to the foreground?  Back up and zoom in.  Playing with focal length and your subject's relationship to what is around it brings an entirely new way of thinking about what will make a shot work.  Play with your zoom lens; move around as you shoot, and discover a new perspective on the world.