The photo below was taken from a tower in London on a rainy day with emphasis on the sky. If you were to decide that the top half of the frame was much more interesting than the bottom, you may want to adjust your composition so that the horizon is a lot lower in the frame. Have a look at the photo below to see what I mean. You also remove the feeling of division and the whole photo starts to come together as a single image made up of multiple elements, rather than just two photos stuck together. If you take the horizon and place it slightly lower in the frame, you regain a feeling of stability which balances out the photo better. Notice that it doesn’t really favour either half. Here’s a photo where the horizon has divided the frame in two. The contrast between the two halves makes it look more like two separate photos.Įxactly where you place the horizon is completely up to you but it helps to remember that, if a feature of a photo does nothing to improve it, it has no place in the photo to begin with.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t ever it, this just has a tendency to divide the photo in half, creating an uneven photo. Where to Place the Horizon and Why?įirstly, I think it’s important to realise where you don’t want to place the line, and that’s directly in the middle of the frame. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, this line can become the dominant part of the photo for the way it separates the frame. They’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. When a frame is divided by a single, dominant line, more often than not this is due to a Horizon. Buy from Unavailable Why Horizon Placement is Important

Horizon line picture