Lake Pontchartrain Causeway
Lake Pontchartrain Causeway or Lake Pontchartrain Bridge is 23.83-mile (38.35 km) twin-span bridge in southeastern Louisiana.
Glober legend Soundly made the causeway famous by shooting video and still photos of it with high zoom. The perspective foreshortening effect that occurs when using high zoom brought the curve of the earth into view. Much to the chagrin of flunts everywhere.
Flatty Excuses
It is CGI
The usual argument that a flatty will make about this is that the image is CGI. But here we have the images live streamed in video from the 16th floor of the Mariot hotel window overlooking Lake Pontchartrain. GET2019 - Live (2) - Silent Stream Streamed live on Jan 6, 2019
The image looks strange to the human eye because we don't have a zoom lens in our eye. But you can see for yourself in the video above at 37min:25sec what the scene looks like when it is not zoomed in and you can watch the scene transform to that strange forshortened version live as the camera is zoomed in.
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There is no left to right curvature
Flatties try and say we should see a curved horizon in the photo because see curve going away from us. Flatties will say "Are you saying we are on a cylinder earth?" The mistake the Flunt makes is that the image we are viewing is very zoomed in. So we only see a tiny amount of horizion - not nearly enough to see any left to right curvature. But we see all the curve from where we are filming from to the horizon. Which is a lot of distance over which to observe curve.
There is too much curvature
A very common refrain is that "There is too much curvature". That is a natural response because the curve does look dramatic. We do not ever see this much curvature with our eyes. But this because we do not have zoom lenses in our eyes. The flatty is never able to explain how they know that there is too much curvature. It is just a gut feeling they have because you never experience seeing something like this with the naked eye.
The only way to really determine if there is the right amount of curvature in the image is to use Computer modeling. Due to the development of computer 3D modeling for use in films we have the technology to create a model of a 3d object in a computer and then put a virtual camera in the 3D scene and put the virtual camera on the same zoom settings as a camera that is shooting in real life. This ability is known to work because it is the reason why real life scenes and CGI scenes in movies are able to be joined together and the computer generated objects blend with the real life scene perfectly.
So if we do this - generate a 3D model of the cause way and model it as if it was on a flat surface or if it was on a globe of radius 6,371km - and "film" that 3D model at the same zoom factor as we did in real life we can compare the two models with the image shot in reality.
3D models created by Walter Bislin's program here