Don’t flatten your scene—use the background and foreground to help you tell the story!
Carl Caylor likes to call it “milk.” He asks, “What is at the top of your grocery shopping list?” The answer is usually dairy products. But where do they put dairy products in the supermarket? They make you walk all the way through the store to get to the dairy section. A photograph can benefit from the same strategy by encouraging the viewer to meander through an image in order to reach something important in the background.
Renaissance painters used the same device. Their aim was to provide a bit of background in the composition to allow the picture to tell a story. Test it. The eye is “happier” when it can roam through the image and not have to stay affixed to the middle.
In Your Dreams plays the foreground against the background to tell a story.
Use photo tricks to place emphasis on certain parts of a photo.