Or that he was in an elevated position relative to the crowd.
Of course, Bob. It's understood if one needs to point the camera down it must be because one is in an elevated position. However, using a wider angle of lens may remove the need to point the camera downwards, allowing one, in this case, to get the lines of the buildings vertical whilst also being able to fit the main subject into the lower part of the frame which can later be cropped in post-processing.
If one still needs to point the camera down, despite using a wider angle of lens, then at least one is likely to have more space around the subject, which allows one to correct for such distortions of perspective, using Photoshop's Free Transform, Distort and Warp, whilst still retaining the elements of the main subject after cropping.
If you examine my distortion corrections in the photo of the 'deepest well in suburbia', reply #53, you should notice that the window in the top left corner has mysteriously increased its width. This was done in order to avoid excessive cropping of the left side of the image as a result of the unavoidable effects of Free Transform and Distort.
I used Context Aware Fill in that top left corner. Now
that could be considered a genuine breaking of the
spirit of the rules (when no manipulation is allowed) because I have misrepresented a physical object. The window in the uncorrected image is clearly shown as having 6 vertical bars, maybe 7, but definitely not 12, as are shown in the corrected image.
However, I consider the altering of the window to be a trivial misrepresentation of 'reality' compared with the
huge misrepresentations in the unaltered image where the well is shown as having an elliptical shape, instead of circular, the ladies are shown as having congenitally deformed heads, and the buildings in the background appear to be absolutely dangerous because they are leaning so much.