Exercise 10: Positioning the Horizon

As Freeman remarks in the course notes, every photo has an implied division.  One of the most basic divisions is along the horizontal plane – where to place the horizon.  This exercise asks the student to take a series of photos of a landscape with an uncluttered horizon in order to consider how horizon affects framing.

The following photos were taken from Club Level (perhaps 10 meters above ground) at Turner Field on a late afternoon in August, shot at 18mm on my Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5 - 5.6G.  One interesting side effect noted in this series is the slight curvature of the horizon.  I would appreciate hearing from anyone with insight on this phenomenon. 

1. With the horizon high, objects in the foreground are highlighted, including here the gate and parking lot, while the tops of the clouds are cut off. 

2.  Moving up, the gate is no longer visible and the clouds are now seen in their fullness. 

3.  The street in front of the parking lot is no longer visible.  Clouds closer to the photographer are now visible, but don’t really add much to the photo.

4.  Only the edge of the parking lot is now visible, and the sky clearly dominates.

5. Finally the barest sliver of the cityscape makes up the bottom fifth of the image.

Of the five photos, the second seems to achieve the best balance of the elements.  The rather underwhelming sky leaves photos 3-5 rather flat and uninteresting. 

Implictations?  There is no fixed rule for where to place the horizon.  It depends in great part on the elements and their relationships as they appear in the view finder, and which elements the photographer wishes to highlight.  I have included a couple of recent photos here as illustration, one with the horizon line in the lower half of the image to capture more of the sky, the other with the horizon line in the upper half to take in foreground (in this, the pond). 

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Postscript 1

Flying home last night from London to Dubai, I spent a good deal of time enjoying aerial views of the European countryside.  This project came to mind and here are the results, positioning the horizon line from high above Hungary.

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Postscript 2

I had been planning to purchase Lightroom to work on processing skills but until I heard from Lucy and Jonesy hadn't yet found a compelling reason.  I've been working through Adobe's training guide and made my first attempt this afternoon at correcting for barrel distortion, which I post below, a revised version of Image 1.  

I need to learn more here, but I feel happy to have identified an issue and started learning more about how to work with it.

So, thanks again, Lucy and Jonesy.

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