"Absolutism." So THAT'S the word I've been looking for!

When I migrated to mirrorless (Fuji in my case) one of the draws was reduced size and weight over a DSLR. In keeping with that spirit and with the belief that I'd be getting a significant advantage in image quality, I opted initially only for prime lenses.

I quickly tired of changing lenses when the situation made it impossible for me to get closer or farther away. What I really got tired of was missing shots. Instead of having an image with 95% of the IQ of a prime, I found I had no image at all.

Not all zooms are created equal of course, and primes absolutely have their place in terms of size and speed, though with today's sensors, if I have to bump up the ISO a stop to make up for the slower lens, I can live with that under most circumstances. We're not shooting 64, 100, or even 400 film stock with these cameras after all.

Now, regarding the section on perspective: This scrambled my brain at first. Of course I've long understood that when you move closer to a subject, the subject gets larger but the background stays about the same size, as opposed to standing still and zooming in which magnifies everything.

What I'm struggling with is the "focal length has no bearing on perspective" and "apparent perspective changes only when the camera position changes" concept.

Putting this in different terms, are you saying that if I took a headshot from, say, 8 feet away with an 85mm lens, switched to a 28mm lens, stayed in the same position, and cropped the photo, both would yield the same "look?" And because we usually don't crop but rather change the camera-to-subject difference, we wrongly interpret that to be a byproduct of focal length?