close up or wide angle; finding a balance

sriesch

Often when trying to place the camera for a scene I'm fighting the simultaneous conflicting urges to try to cram as much of the background into the scene as possible while getting as close to the figure(s) as possible to be able to see expressions or detail or the entire figure or whatever.  Has anybody come up with any decent tricks for getting the most out of both at the same time?

wide angle of course distorts, so one can't use it too much, although I have had some success with actually distorting the foreground objects in one dimesion to compensate for the camera distortion stretching.  A crouching figure would of course allow you to get much closer without cutting parts of the figure off than a standing one.  A top-down or bottom-up angle would have the same effect.  A large reflective surface might allow more of the background to be "seen" while keeping the camera zoomed in on the figure, although I've not tried that yet.  Perhaps there are similar tricks that can be used to suggest items out of the field of view without actually showing them.  Other ideas?