The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

STACKING

Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1990

With the right conditions, a telephoto—and especially a long telephoto—can give the effect of a stack of upright planes, like a pack of cards, arranged one behind the other. This is what is happening here in a shot with a 400mm lens down the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The stack in this case is provided by the series of bends in the gorge, but other things go into the effect: the viewpoint is high enough to see over each high rocky spur; the summer haze and backlighting hide the details in each plane and help to make them two-dimensional; while the compressing effect of the long focal length (see the previous ...