Why do pictures never look as steep?

[Golf Cart]

A hill is a hill is a hill.

I want to know how the fishing was

[impalator]

If you work the camera a bit, you can definitively achieve a "steeper picture"... (are you crouching low, when taking the pic... close to the ground.... hold the camera at a bit of an angle ... i.e. exaggerating..... step a bit further back so that the entire scenery with landmarks that show how steep it really is - are seen?.. all that kind of stuff may work...)

I took a few images a while back that weren't even that crazy steep - but they look fairly steep... (that's the beauty of digital photography... take 50 pics of the same thing at various angles, zoomed in, zoomed out, from the top, from below, close to the ground etc. etc... )

Cheers,
Chris


Wasn't even that steep (mind you, the door flew right open, when I stepped out to take the pic...

[wetcoast]

The proof is in the dash guages.

[Erebus]

Our perceptions do funny things. On a hike I did in 2002, the terrain was incredibly steep. But the photo doesn't show it.

Tom is standing up, facing the right. The terrain doesn't look too steep at first glance, but look closer, and you see both his feet are on the ground, while his upper leg is horizontal. So in about 1/2 a metre, the rise in terrain is almost a metre. In the photo it looks like a 30 degree slope, but it was more like 60 degrees or more.

That's the trick about photography -- to make it look like what you are seeing. Or you can make it look more steep or less steep, depending on what you want to do.

Photos don't lie, they just tell a different truth.