Getting what I see with my own eyes to translate to a photo.

[misterjones]

Your memory is conflicting with reality.
From a given FIXED point, any lens and your eye will give you the same perspective.
The only difference is the field of view and what is in the picture, which depends on the lens. A wide lens gives you a lot wider field of view and more foregound. A tele lens a narrow field of view, and little or no foreground.
The wide lens on your phone, by having a wider field of view makes the mountains proportionally smaller. But does not change its height relative to other objects in the picture.

To test this.
STAND in place and look at a scene with your eyes only.
Then take a pix with your camera.
Do the objects in the picture have the same size, relative to each other, compared to viewing with your eyes? They should.

They usually don't, and that's where my frustration lies. Granted, I get that the camera in a phone is going to be limited, but it's been a rare occasion where I'm taking pics of mountains and whatnot and what I see with my eye is actually what's captured even with my other two cameras.

To change perspective, you have to change your distance from the objects.
Look at the size of the far light post (4 poles down from the Kia), which is approx the visual height of the mountain.
When your car was a few hundred feet (or 4 or 5 light poles distance) back from where the pix was taken, the light pole next to the Kia in the pix, looked smaller, and similar to the visual height of the mountains.

As for the tall mountains. You need a longer lens to visually magnify the mountains. The wide lens on your phone is going in the opposite direction, giving you more sky and foreground, and less mountain.

I went through some pics I shot some years ago heading back to Phoenix from Las Vegas .

These were taken at an observation area on I93 southbound from Nevada on the way to Kingman, AZ. It overlooks Willow Beach in the Black Canyon area of the Colorado River.

The first one I was ok with, as I actually wanted the "beach" area (i.e. the small-ish foothills with clumps of grass in the foreground), but like with the other pics the canyon in the distance wasn't as large as what my eyes were observing. I took a second shot which was closer to what my eyes could see, but I lost part of the foreground in the process. So it seems that in order to get the mountains in the distance to appear the correct height, I'm going to potentially lose the foreground by effectively "looking past" it?

 

[Tim Tucker 2]

No viewfinder ever gives an accurate representation of how the finished image will appear, neither will looking at the 3D scene. Perspective is entirely dependant on position, where you stand in the landscape and in the case of a photograph where you position the camera. If you move it then that perspective, (or relative positions of objects), changes, even with landscape vistas.

What is mainly forgotten though is that the camera's position when it took the photo and the focal length you used to take it is not visible in the image. Perspective is entirely dependant on position, and this applies to when you view the image as well. The distance at which you view the image affects how you see the perspective, but it is neither exact or measurable because of a trick of the eye named *consistency of vision*, (basically if you view a print from many distances you will see much the same thing because the brain will always present you with a consistent view of the world).

If you view an image at any distance other than one that matches the exact position of the camera you will see a distortion of perspective. This is why there is a *standard* focal length for each format, it basically equates to the approximate focal length where the position you view the image from and the position it was shot from are much the same. This is why they don't distort the perspective, (vision doesn't really have a focal length as it's a combination of different optical systems over time processed and combined in the brain. What you think you *see* is not a direct connection to your eyes but a visual construct of your imagination. It's closer to truth than the idea that vision is absolute...).

Take many images from the same position with the same camera and different focal lengths, then print them all at A3 size. There is no indication in the visible image of either focal length or FOV, in fact the FOV of ALL the images is exactly the same when you view them, A3...

If you examine all the images you will find that actually the relative sizes of objects is the same, the lamp post is the same height above the car and the mountains are the same height in relation to the lamp post. What does change though is your assumption of the relative distances of these objects. Perspective is entirely dependant on position. When you view two A3 prints side by side, one with a UWA and the other with a telephoto then the one with the UWA will *appear* to make the background recede. It doesn't do this in reality, it is just a consequence of you making the wrong assumptions when you *view the image*. If you take an image with an UWA with an fov of 100 degrees then view the print with which fills an fov of 45 degrees from you position as observer of the print you will see an *illusion*. Think of it as a maths problem:

Combine this with the perspective effects of the distance at which you shoot and you have a more complete answer:

How you capture what the eye sees is entirely the wrong question. What you should understand is how the camera *distorts* what the eye sees and how that will appear in print or on a screen. All images are a distortion, it's understanding why this is and how to manipulate it rather than trying to cancel it in the belief that cameras capture the *reality* of what your eye sees because nothing could really be further from the truth. As you've discovered...