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.
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.