Photography; Composition; Horizon

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One of the common mistakes in landscape photography is horizons that are not parallel to the up and down sides of the picture. I was doing that mistake when i first started taking nature and landscape pictures. Main reason was i only paid attention the scene in front of me and never checked the horizon line.

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In landscape photography horizon should be horizontal. There are some items that shows if your camera is completely straight and parallel to the ground; such as the spirit levels on a tripod or spirit levels that you can mount on your camera. If you had none, you can use the dots that you see when you are looking through the visor of the camera. Place all the dots in the horizontal line on the horizon then take the shot. Of course these dots are in the middle of the frame, and adjusting the horizon according to these dots will make the horizon centered in your picture. But mostly placing the horizon in the center of the picture doesn’t give nice results. So after adjusting the horizon line parallel to the sides of the picture, shift your camera up or down in order to change the position of the horizon.

In my earlier post i wrote about composition, so if you don’t remember take a look to the rule of thirds. To have more impressive landscape pictures do not place the horizon right in the middle, place it slightly above or below. If you want to show the beautiful sky then let the sky fills 2/3 of the frame and land or ground fills the rest which is 1/3. And reverse, if you want show something on the ground and eliminate the boring gray sky, let the land fills the 2/3 of the picture and sky fills 1/3. And the horizon line is the line that separates 2/3 from 1/3 so place it to divide the frame leaving 1/3 of picture below or above the horizon line. And make sure it is parallel to the edges of the picture.

There’s one more thing that you can do. You can divide the picture 1/2 to 1/2 by placing horizon diagonal from one corner to another in the frame. As shown in the example;