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?

  • SyJ
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    1 year ago

    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.