Did some reading, started typing a reply, read it more, procrastinated, then forgot about this, rinse and repeat.
Actually, objects closer to the eyeline become compressed by perspective more rapidly than those farther from it. This is covered extensively in Chapter XIV of ENaG which also illustrates the failings of common or "art school perspective", for lack of a better term.
-Read through that section, but I'm just not seeing it. I read the stuff a few times on his take on perspective as it pertains to things receding into the distance and the 'eye line', which I guess in this case is the water line.
Sure the 'eye-line' is a distinct visible feature, but as I was viewing the hillside through a scope, things were distorted. The camera is only capturing an image of the light reaching the scope. For all intents and purposes, that hillside in the pictures has pretty much become a 2-dimensional feature. He goes on and on about near objects receding into the distance, but I'm looking a large and very wide feature at a fixed distance from two different elevations.
But even on the sea, when the water is very calm, if a vessel is observed until it is just "hull down," a powerful telescope turned upon it will restore the hull to sight. From which it must be concluded that the lower part of a receding ship disappears through the influence of perspective, and not from sinking behind the summit of a convex surface.
-I tried various levels of magnification and nothing changed.
Those who believe that the earth is a globe have often sought to prove it to be so by quoting the fact that when the ship's hull has disappeared, if an observer ascends to a higher position the hull again becomes visible. But this, is logically premature; such a result arises simply from the fact that on raising his position the eye-line recedes further over the water before it forms the angle of one minute of a degree, and this includes and brings back the hull within the vanishing point, as shown in fig. 84-Light doesn't care about a minute of a degree. If my line of sight is above the surface of the water the entire distance, what is actually distorting the light from the objects higher than the water? There must be some type of refraction occuring. If that water is actually flat and my line of sight is above it the whole way, then the refraction is also curving the light of the higher objects down and straigtening it, but doing it in a way that doesn't compress it like the lower objects.
Perspective can fool the eyes and senses sometimes, but a camera captures whatever light is reaching it. Sure there are pictures of that room that makes someone up close look smaller than the person further away at the back of it (TB posted a little while ago if I remember), or something like that, but I was photographing an actual distortion of light.
I can look at all kinds of distant objects ranging from a car to a mountain, and with varying levels of magnification, and it isn't until I'm looking along an almost parallel and very long surface that things start becoming distorted (excluding the usual atmospheric wavering).
If an object be held up in the air, and gradually carried away from an observer who maintains his position, it is true that all its parts will converge to one and the same point--the centre, in relation to which the whole contracts and diminishes. But if the same object is placed on the ground, or on a board, as shown in diagram 74, and the lower part made distinctive in shape or colour, and similarly moved away from a fixed observer, the same predicate is false. In the first case the centre of the object is the datum to which every point of the exterior converges; but in the second case the ground or board practically becomes the datum in and towards which every part of the object converges in succession--beginning with the lowest, or that nearest to it.-The building, landslide, trees, and bridge are all pretty distinctive from the water. If the objects are supposed to be converging because they're too small for the naked eye to make them out, then magnification should bring them back to detail and elliminate the 'converging' effect. It didn't.
I guess (to me anyway) what I observed while taking the pictures simply fits what is expected of RET more so than FET.
Sooner or later I'll happen by there again with my scope on clear day and see if anything looks different. I'd love to take a ladder along in my truck and gain another 12-15 feet over the other two elevations.