chrysoberyl said:
I readily admit that my grasp of optical physics is limited. I read this forum to alleviate that. Thank you for your informative although sometimes sarcastic posts.
The greater the focal length of a lens, the more it magnifies. Keeping object distance the same, a telephoto lens renders it larger than a wideangle lens. This much should be obvious. But it also directly follows that if you want to render an object the same size with a wideangle as with a telephoto, you need to decrease the object distance. To get a 1:1 magnification with a 35mm lens then obviously requires a shorter focusing distance than with, say, a 100mm lens.