You may want to do an experiment before you before you add to this post. I recall a few years back there was an article on this subject and the writer took a photo which he had taken of a street scene with a telephoto lens. There were buildings along both sides of the street with buildings going up a hill stacked in the distance. It certainly looked like the buildings were compressed together. But then he took a shot with a wide angle lens and enlarged a section to show the exact scene as taken with the telephoto. The photos looked the same. So is compression real, or just a matter of the way we look at a photo.