I've been sitting here a while being pretty unproductive and simply letting thoughts roam through my head. As the night progressed, I started wondering how images are focused through the lens. You can look through the back of the lens but our eyes physically can not focus closer than a few inches away, a distance farther than the back of the lens to the film/digital sensor. Cameras can focus on much closer distances than the human eye.
I then started looking at how various focal lengths affect the image. Longer focal lengths produce a larger image. No surprise there. The image above shows the girl on my desktop as seen through the back of a 50mm lens. In Physics 1, we studied basic lenses with just one piece of glass. The 50mm has 7 elements. My 70-200 has 23. I'm really curious as to how this all works...
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