What kind of extra lens do you attach to your iPhone to make far-off subjects appear much closer and more detailed?
The extra lens you attach to an iPhone to make far-off subjects appear much closer and more detailed is called a telephoto lens. A telephoto lens achieves this by possessing a significantly longer focal length compared to the iPhone's built-in standard or wide-angle lenses. Focal length refers to the optical distance from the lens's center to the camera's image sensor when a subject is in sharp focus. A longer focal length inherently narrows the camera's field of view, which is the specific area of the scene that the camera can capture. This narrowed field of view effectively magnifies distant subjects, causing them to appear much larger and closer in the resulting photograph than they would with the iPhone's native lens from the same shooting position. This magnification directly enables the capture of finer details that would otherwise be too small or indistinct in a wider shot.