All else being equal, switching to a longer lens won't make the relative size of the elements of the image change at all. You can simulate the results just by

All else being equal, switching to a longer lens won't make the relative size of the elements of the image change at all. You can simulate the results just by cropping photos taken with the wide iPhone lens. There will be no difference between the perspective of a cropped iPhone picture and an uncropped picture with a longer lens. Of course such cropping will be likely to throw stuff away from the borders of the image that you'd rather keep, because you composed before you cropped. To avoid losing stuff on the edges, you'd have had to stand further away from your subject, which happens naturally when you're shooting with a longer lens. But you could have stood further away, shot with an iPhone, and then cropped in, and the only difference between that and a "true" zoom lens is that it's probably blurrier because you are working with fewer pixels. (the above is only true for rectilinear lenses, it's the linearity of the perspective that means that zooming == cropping) The article is about how when a human looks at a scene, you'll see quite a wide angle, but when you take a photo that covers a similar angle to what you're perceiving, you end up with an image that seems to exaggerate the sense of depth that you had at the time. This is at least partly because human eyes aren't rectilinear; you can shoot with a non-rectilinear lens but then all the straight lines you expect... aren't. A skilled artist can produce a scene with 1) straight lines 2) a similar field of view, and 3) "natural" depth, as in the Turner painting in the article. To do this you have to depart from linear perspective. You couldn't get Turner's painting just by standing further away; he's doing something rather more complicated.