So I’m sitting here looking at a black widow on my porch and it’s a big fat fucker. I wanted to take a pic but I don’t want to get too close. Yet the image my camera picks up looks like I am trying to snap the pic from the opposite wall of the porch when I’m only about 2 feet from the spider. Why is that?
I’ve heard somewhere that it has to do with the area of focus in your vision. Even though we humans have an almost 180o field of view, we have a small “focal region”, which is just a small fraction of that.
When you look at a landscape, or the moon, you can move your focus area to pick up details at different spots. When you take a picture, the whole area is captured at the same level of detail. When you look at the picture, the whole image, and detail now fits within your focus area at the same time. Apparently this is why those kind of images never really look the same in photos; a photo can never properly enhance the focal area.