Perspective compression
Shooting from far away with a long lens so the background looks huge and stacked right behind the subject.
See it
What it is
Stand a long way back, zoom in, and the size difference between near and far things shrinks. The result: a mountain, a neon sign, or a crowd behind your subject renders enormous and looks like it is one step away. The canonical examples are the giant full moon looming behind a tiny figure, and the telephoto Los Angeles street shot where four blocks of traffic look bumper to bumper.
Reach for it when the background needs to be a character: a skyline behind a founder, a stadium behind an athlete, a shelf of product behind a bottle. It also tidies up chaos, because flattening a scene collapses it into clean graphic layers. The opposite move is wide-angle expansion: get close with a short lens and the foreground looms while the background runs away.
Gotcha: the lens is not doing it, the distance is. Shoot the same scene wide from the same faraway spot and crop in, and you get identical perspective. The long lens just forces you to back up. The practical cost is space: real 200mm compression needs tens of meters of runway, which is why it almost never happens indoors.
Ask AI for it
Shoot this with heavy telephoto perspective compression: 200mm full-frame lens from roughly 12 meters away, subject framed head to knee, and the mountain behind them rendered enormous and stacked immediately at their back with almost no sense of distance between the two. Flatten the depth planes into clean graphic layers, keep vertical lines nearly parallel, and add no wide-angle stretching at the frame edges.