Chi & others:
I quite agree that two photos taken from the same vantage point with a wide angle and a telephoto lens will have vastly different perspective. The WA photo contains much more information, particularly when it contains many objects in the foreground and background. But when you enlarge and crop that photo to produce the same FOV as captured by the tele, you discard all that information and end up with the same image as the tele.
The following is an excerpt from an excellent article by Alain Briot, a well respected professional photographer and teacher. I would highly recommend that the entire article be read at:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/composition-3.shtml
“Exercise C
Take a photograph of the same scene, without moving your camera and tripod,
with both a wide angle and a telephoto lens. When you return to your studio
crop and enlarge the photograph taken with the wide angle lens so that you get
the same composition as the image taken with the telephoto lens.
Compare the two telephoto images: the one created with a telephoto lens and
the one created by cropping the wide angle view. You will not see any
differences as far as composition and “compression†of the scene are
concerned.
Telephoto lenses do not compress distant scenery any more than wide-angle lenses distort scenery (except for fish-eye lenses). The perspective created by a telephoto lens is the same as that of a wide angle lens, except that only a fraction of the wide angle photograph is visible in a telephoto view.
Distant objects are naturally “compressed†because as objects recede in the distance (get further away from us) they appear to be closer and closer together. This effect is caused by perspective, not by lenses. Going from a wide angle to a telephoto lens or cropping a photo has the same effect.
Theoretically, provided we were able to take photographs with limitless resolution, we could always use a wide angle lens and crop our photographs as we see fit once we back in our studio. From this single image we could get all the croppings and compositions we want and each of these croppings would look as if they had been created by using different lenses. In practice, due the finite resolution of film and image sensors, this is not feasible.â€
Mike.