RickshawFan
Verified Outdoor Recreation Specialist
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Wow, you found the right group of boiling pots?Regarding the Yellowstone photos, the affidavit states the group consisted solely of JJ, Tylee, Alex and Lori. Here is the spot where the photos were taken and it is helpful that the wood rails provide parallel lines at right angles to each other:
We can use the rules of perspective to project these surfaces as vectors with vanishing points on the horizon:
Thus, we can confidently conclude that the photographer was standing on the wooden platform when both photos were taken.
I pulled the 10-meter topographic data for this area and confirmed the horizon behind Alex is elevated relative to the level of the wooden platform. I would need to acquire actual measurements or a LIDAR scan of the scene to be certain, but the topography suggests that the camera lens is lower than Alex's eye height.
Another useful photogrammetric principal you can use is to place a dot in the center of a photograph and this will represent precisely where the lens is pointing. If this photo hasn't been cropped the camera was pointing just to the right of Tylee's mouth. Of course, the camera could have been tilted down, but these factors suggest the photographer was shorter than Alex or that the camera was being held at a lower position by whomever took the image (almost certainly Lori, in my judgement).
I'm not convinced that photo (Photo B, shall we call it?) is in the same spot as the YNP photo. The relationship between AxC's head in Photo B to the far-ground hill doesn't seem to be what you'd get if you had someone standing in that corner, taken from the direction where the camera seems to be located. A different segment of the hill would show.
However, the YNP photo might not be current. Every time I go to YNP those boiling pots have all changed, new ones have come to the surface, etc (fascinating), so I'll bet the boardwalks have to be newly constructed on a regular basis. The shading on the colorful rocks would be different from year to year, too. Photo B has what looks like an ivory-colored trail between Tylee's and AxC's heads, but that slack-S curve is not on the YNP photo, even in the rock coloring.