The terms foreground, midground, and background name the three depth planes of a scene: what sits nearest the camera, what lies in the middle, and what falls farthest away. Deliberately building an image with all three is called layering, and it is one of the most reliable ways to create a sense of depth and three-dimensionality in a flat, two-dimensional photograph.
Each plane plays a role in the composition. The foreground anchors the viewer and offers a point of entry, often a rock, flower, or texture close to the lens. The midground usually carries the main subject. The background supplies context and atmosphere, whether distant mountains or a soft wash of sky. A classic mountain scene might run from a stream and stones in the foreground, through a band of pines in the midground, to peaks and clouds in the background, and the eye travels naturally through all three.
When the eye can move from near to far through these layers, the image gains depth that a single flat plane cannot provide. Several techniques encourage strong layering. A wide-angle lens used low and close exaggerates the size of foreground elements and stretches the apparent distance between planes. Overlapping elements, where a nearer object partly covers a farther one, gives the brain a clear cue about which is in front.
Keeping all three planes sharp can be a challenge. A small aperture extends depth of field so that near and far stay acceptably sharp, which matters most in landscapes, and where one frame cannot hold the whole range, photographers blend several frames focused at different distances. The opposite choice, a wide aperture that keeps only the subject sharp, uses the foreground and background as soft color and shape rather than detail.
Layering connects to other compositional tools. Leading lines can pull the eye from foreground to background, a sense of scale emerges when a known foreground object sits against a vast distance, and the relationship between planes shapes the perspective of the whole frame. Empty negative space in one plane can make the others read more clearly.
The idea applies well beyond landscapes, in street scenes, environmental portraits, and architecture, but landscape work leans on it most heavily. For a focused treatment of building a strong near plane in scenic work, see our guide to foreground interest in landscape photography. The habit to develop is to ask, for every scene, what belongs in each of the three layers, then to move your feet until they stack the way you want.
A simple exercise builds the habit. Find a scene with obvious depth, then deliberately shoot it three ways, once emphasizing the foreground low and close, once balancing all three planes, and once compressing them with a longer lens. Comparing the results teaches faster than any rule how much the arrangement of near, middle, and far changes the feel of an image.