Any tips for expanding photos without distortion?

The only way I know how in Photoshop is doing a reverse crop, but if the background is clear instead of blurry, it always seems to look awful. Is there another way to do it? Or a way to keep it from being distorted without making the photo overly-processed?

Thanks!

Edit: a) sorry for the vagueness--it seemed like a technique a lot of people were using. Below I posted this

I'm talking about taking a single photo and basically stretching it to make more space on the top, bottom, or sides. Although, I suppose it might just be easier to stitch the shots together, although I don't have a whole lot of experience with that. This video is kind of what I'm wanting to do, except most of my shots are not taken in a studio, so the background isn't plain white. One of my friends who did it just told me that it takes a lot of patience and work with the clone stamp tool to make it look normal.

Some of the suggestions, for anyone else looking to learn the same thing

• a wider angle lens, which I can't afford at the moment

• content aware scaling

• seam carving

• when shooting on a tripod, take additional photos & stitch them into the final product.