One of my participants recently made the assumption that this image was made with a telephoto because of the deliberate out of focus foreground, and also perhaps because the Cono de Arita is a hard subject to judge in terms of distance.

Well the image was made with a standard lens, in my case that means an 80mm lens. Although it has a similar field of view as a 40mm lens on a 35mm camera has, it still has the compression and depth of field properties of an 80mm lens. So there is that to consider. But the main reason why the foreground is so out of focus is because the camera was lying on the surface of the ground.

Tripod height is critical in composing. I so often see participants locked at the same height for the duration of a workshop, and for me, I always like to experiment to see how the image may change if I put the camera much lower, or even much higher than I am.

Some locations are so vast, that even when I have moved, the scene changes little. Bolivia and the Puna of Argentina are such places. If I cannot find anything of note to use in the foreground then I will experiment with focal lengths to try to give different perspective.

But I often think that we ignore placing the camera below our own eye level at times, and in particular putting the camera right down on the ground really forces the foreground to be extremely blurred. I like this effect a lot, and it does help impart a sense of dynamics and compression to the shot.