Why is so much nonsense talked about telephoto compression?

The oft-quoted 180+ degree AOV for human vision does not include an ability to identify objects at right and left.

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Except death due to starvation caused by running away from edible beasts thinking they were predators.

I'll leave the coveted Last Word to your good self.

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I remember buying my 28mm wide-angle for the Nikon F2 because I wanted something that didn't look "50mm". Definitely did that, and it stayed welded to the F2, 'cept when shooting portraits, then I mounted the 105mm.

I've been staring out the window this morning, trying to "see" just a small part of the scene in the distance. I can definitely make out what would be called "compression" in the distant stuff (with not much resolution, BTW, even with my recently-acquired cataract surgery super-vision), but I can't get rid of all the rest of the scene that reminds me of what I'm looking at.

Really, to my bear-of-little-brain thinking, a long lens is just a "scene cropper".

When you look through binoculars or a telescope, does it make things look closer?

At first, I thought that was a joke but actually it seems quite a good question. I'd say he was sitting pretty close but I don't know the canvas size ...

... me too!

To me 50 mm felt way too narrow... so I got myself a 49.9 mm lens: 😂

Just kidding! But perhaps my Agfa Mikrogon 27.7 mm might do the trick? 😉

I don't know why, to me really wide angle images often look quite unnatural, even when they're very well corrected. They don't look bad, just strange, because they seem to differ too much from what I'm usually perceiving with my eyes. @davidwien shared some interesting observations about it in the thread he mentioned before and it made me think that I'll have to experiment a lot more with different focal lengths + tilting, which may help me get a look for landscapes/street photography etc. which I find more natural (that's probably just for me though).

I have the same feeling about telephoto images, at least beyond a certain focal length, but I find them less distracting, perhaps because there's often not as much going on. Still have to think about that as well...

But of course. And, that's one significant thing you get with a telephoto lens, magnification onto your sensor. Beats cropping a teeny part of an image with the reduced resolution. Both give the same perspective, one just looks crappy.

Now, this is just a bit of opportunistic example-ing, some photos I took back in 2015 that give the opportunity to see what magnification buys. I posted one of these earlier in the thread, here it is again so you don't have to pan up to find it:

200mm magnification, 35mm (FF) format.

Now, here's a wide-angle shot looking in the same direction, note that I'm not standing in the same place, a little further back:

Sorry I don't have a wide-angle shot of the first image, but I'm going to now post a crop from this one that tries to approximate the first one:

Crappy. About the same perspective, though.

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That is very odd! When I look at the picture from the rear-view camera on my car, everything looks further away than it is. When I look in the rear-view mirror, things look about the right distance away.

Yes, I see what you mean. When backing the car, something behind changes very quickly from looking far away to looking too close.

Yes, a slight convexity does the trick. A wide view, but less than useless for gauging distances.

Not related, I used to rent a lot of cars. Got into one one time, set all the mirrors the way I wanted, shifted into reverse, looked to clear and they were all out of kilter. Fought with that for a day or so, lamenting that at a meeting where one of my cohorts said, "it's rotating the mirrors down so you can see the curb when you shift into reverse." Geesh; I miss my manual transmission... 😆