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?
Are there lenses that can mimic the human eye on this?
You need a 50mm lens for a full frame sensor, or the equivalent for the sensor size you are using. There should be some site to calculate that equivalence. That’s the lens focal length that best resembles the human eye. Also the zoom on your camera should be able to mimic the same effect.
And beyond that, to record the detail your eye sees, you need a greater zoom lens and/or much higher pixel count. The area which my eye can actually see detail is only the size of my thumb nail at arm’s length. That’s less than 2 degrees, about 6-10 letters at a comfortable font for the distance for me. Consider how you can’t read this whole comment in one go, you take it 1-3 words at a time. The moon, for example, is only 1/2 a degree wide for us Earthlings. So when you use an average phone camera with a 90+ degree field of view, those <2 degree objects get drowned in the other 95%+ of the image. So yes, when talking to a person, a 50mm lens on a nice full frame^1 gives you a decent equivalent clarity, but can you see both eyes at the same time? Or do you choose just one? And then look at their nose, their hairline, their mouth, all one at a time? When you want to photograph the moon, a full frame camera needs something like a 400mm lens.
The other drawback to phones is the lack of optical zoom. Yes we have a few phones out with multiple lenses and there’s a few tricks with oversized sensors, but ultimately, phone zoom is still primarily the same as pinch zooming the image after the fact. Digital zoom is just using fewer pixels to simulate optical zoom. A 7x zoom image of the moon is no different than cropping down a 1x zoom image later. Like I said, there are improvements evolving such as “pro” models having the equivalent of a 50mm/full frame setup or a 50mp camera having a 70mp sensor to digital zoom without clarity loss, but eyes still have them beat by a mile.
^1 “full frame” refers to a certain size camera sensor/film in dslr/slr cameras with interchangeable lenses. It’s not the most common camera now, but it’s a prolific standard to which we can best make comparisons through for now because they’re still relevant in professional and hobby photography
It’s tricky.
You can come close to the perspective with what we call a “normal” lens (50mm focal length on full frame, 35mm on APS-C Crop sensors).
The other issue you have is that human vision is not a sharp rectangle and that it’s extremely dynamic. You can look around a scene and refocus your vision almost instantly, while a photograph provides one fixed viewpoint and focus.
One more thing to improve perspective in images can be the use of comparisons in the image. A mountain with a house or a person at the bottom can look bigger because our brain knows how big those things are and understands the scale. In the case of the spider I usually photograph them next to a coin, as most people will recognise how big that is.