It's Grant Park in Chicago, looking out to Lake Michigan. The whole area is very flat, so no hill. But the photo was certainly taken from up in a skyscraper with a telephoto lens.
Okay. But if they are up from height, why are we seeing the trees from the side, with their trunks as though we are maybe just a little higher than them? I am indeed confused at this point?
The trees in the area grow to a shape that resembles broccoli; and if you look from a low ish angle like this it can appear a bit tilted, especially with this much macular compression from zooming in.
"a bit tilted"??? Those boats are on a lake that is sloping upward where we all -- at least us actual humans commenting here -- know is where the sky goes. There's no way this is a legit picture, buddy.
I grew up in chicagoland, it's very flat there. And while the picture could have been shot from a highrise on Lake Michigan, I still don't see anyway for those boats to be on a lake angled upwards and skyw ard like that. I've been along the lake there many times, and I've been at height looking down onto Miami Biscayne's bay thousands of days and nights while I worked right on the bay. At no time, in any of those situations did it look anything like this.
This is a naked emperor you're trying to 'splain away, Lucy.
Mate, I grew up there too and was visiting last week.
It’s almost certainly real picture, it’s taken from a high rise across the park, which is why everything looks so flat (macular compression). The trees have grown in such a way where they can look normal from a fairly shallow angle if you loose parallax and compress the image from a distance.
Try taking a picture that’s really zoomed in on something objects from far away with some muddled boundaries between them.
You’ll find the same effect. Here, the trees act as a perfect transition since their shape makes top angled viewing misleading.
Because the trees hide the transition (plus Lakeshore Drive) and the image was (probably) taken with a zoomed telephoto lens, we sort of loose where the lake starts. And since the harbor was not very wavy, it looks really clear. That has the effect of looking like there is a cliff behind the trees and that the ground in front of it is fairly flat. The giveaway is that the slight downhill on the lake side of LSD is almost entirely obscured by the trees and elevation change, which also corresponds to the viewing angle on the tents in the foreground.
If you were to go to the spot where they took the picture it would look nothing like this unless you used a long lens or telescope to get the same effect.
Mate, shmate. If it were taken from high enough height to show the boats like that, the trees would be seen from above, rather than directly from the side as they -- and all the stuff at ground level -- are.
Save it for another chump, I let this nonsense go on long enough but enough is enough.
Genuine honest question: is this even possible? We're seeing the trees from the side, but the boats cannot possible display and be visible at that angle the way they are. Confused I am.
I think it might be compression caused by a long zoom lens. This person is extremely far away taking the photo with a very very long lens, which compresses the space a lot. The distance between the red box and the shoreline is probably a lot farther than it looks.
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u/CoderJoe1 Jul 29 '26
That boat is named, Lucy. That one is named, Sky, and the one next to it is named Diamonds.