There's a really crazy think that happens when you change the focal length of your lens. As a landscape photographer, I spend a lot of time photographing with an 18-70 mm lens. The lower numbers on a lens means it's "sees" a wider angle which makes for wonderful and interesting compositions in landscape photography - all those leading lines and beautiful foregrounds with majestic backgrounds. Wide angle lenses are a photographer's bread & butter.
But there are times when you should put the wide angle lens back in the bag.
In situations where your foreground is miles from your background for instance. Take a look at the photo above and the photo below, both taken from the same road. Notice a difference? I'm sure you do.
The top photo was created with a 100-300 mm telephoto zoom set at 300. The bottom photo was created with my old 18-70 mm workhorse.
So what creates the difference? Why do the mountains look so far away in the bottom photo but so close in the top one? It all has to do with the angle of view.
A wide angle lens "sees" so much more of the environment. Your angle of view using a lens with a lower focal length is wide. As the focal length of your lens increases - 100 mm, 200 mm, 300 mm - the angle of view lessens and begins to compress the elements of the scene together.
So in the bottom photo, you can see all of the buildings on the farm, the field in the foreground and the mountains in the background miles away. In the top photo, the extra elements of the scene are remove - focused in on the important elements (barn & mountains) and because of the visual effect of the longer focal length lens, the mountains appear to be right behind the barn.
Here's a nice article with a few diagrams to explain this phenomenon in more detail.
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