I believe this is a perspective/distortion issue. Once upon a time I knew a lot more about barrel and pincushion distortion, among other things...
The clue for me was that, in photographs,
generally, things that are closer to the camera look larger. However, the runway
behind the aircraft appears wider than that in the foreground. For grins I threw it into PhotoShop just to see what it would look like if I altered the perspective and made the runway in the background narrower than the runway in the foreground. Here's what I got:
Looks more like a "normal" departure.
Note that I'm not a PhotoShop pro, nor am I current on distortion issues. Also, the aircraft doesn't come out of this transformation looking quite right. Still, I think that two things are important to keep in mind:
1. It is highly unlikely that a 74 departing LAX had the sort of deck angle the one in the original image appears to have; and,
2. The look of the runway in the original image is not quite right.
This having been said, I am not implying the photo is faked (nor am I implying that it is not faked). I believe that it may be a trick of the lens. A stunning trick, yes. But a trick none-the-less.
Dave