Bizar: Diagonally growing trees?

An ordinary photo of trees made extraordinary: When walking uphill and tilting the camera, the trees seem to grow diagonally.

This picture was shot during a small trip to Germany. We stayed in Liesen (near Winterberg) in the great Hotel “Haus am Steinschab“. This is one of those hotels that changes ownership once every 5 years or so and the new owners do not change anything. Which was great though 🙂
We came to the area in September to walk and make photo’s of the fall in the area. On the second day we were there, we walked to the Bollerberg, a local hill with a viewingpoint.

The road up hill was a long one and I saw a shortcut, straight up the hill. Pretty steep uphill, but it took at least 5 minutes off our climb to the top :-). My wife was a little less happy though 🙂
Due to the fact that we were walking more steep uphill through the woods, my eye catched the trees to the side of the “path”. The trees were growing straight up, but because this was uphill, when tilting my head, I saw the ground straight and the trees diagonally growing to the left. Because you could not see the horizon at that spot, you could not tell whether the trees were really growing diagonally or that the viewpoint was tilted.

I grabbed my camera, set it on aperture priority with an aperture value of 4. At that moment in time, I believed that the lowest aperture would give the best result. The lens I used was the 75-300 kitlens of Canon, so I had to stand quite a bit back from the scene, even at a focallength of 75 mm. With the ISO at 100, the camera choose an exposure of 210th of a second. No need for a tripod or anything.
If I would remake the picture, I would probably go for a lens with a smaller focallength (perhaps 50 mm) and an F-number of about 11. Then, everything would have been sharp in the image.

In post, I did not do anything. In that day and age, I would not touch an image, because I did not know what I was doing. In conclusion, the picture was entirely made on the spot, without any post processing and without any fancy settings. That made this shot a great impulsive photo!

Camera settings:

Location