8 Tips for Shooting Landscapes with Horizons

8 Tips for Shooting Landscapes with Horizons
8 Tips for Shooting Landscapes with Horizons

In this photo, the umbrella is in the lower right corner.

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The angles and placement of the two objects near the upper left corner work well here.

5. Use a small aperture.

To include as much as the scenery possible, use a long depth of field. Using a more closed aperture makes the depth of field longer (and the f-stop setting a higher number). This allows for more things to be in focus. While blurring out the background is sometimes preferred, with landscape photos, we often want to have many elements in focus.

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In this photo, the camera focuses on the grass, but we want the depth of field to be high so we can see more of the landscape as well.

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This is one example where we can see the detail of even elements far away.

6. Don’t put the horizon in the middle of the shot.

This tip is closely related to the rule of thirds tip: don’t put subjects (the subject being the horizon in this example) in the middle of the shot. While many beginning photographers may be inclined to divide the photo in half, having the horizon the top third, or even top fifth or top eighth, is much better, as is having the horizon in the bottom third, fifth, or eighth. This allows us to focus on either the sky or the ocean or earth so we have some kind of focus.

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7. If the sun is harsh, shoot away from it to get blue skies.

Shooting close to where the sun is causes the areas to be blown out.

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This example of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood shows how areas are blown out when shooting to close to the sun.

8. Finally, keep the horizon level.

This one may seem obvious, and although there are times when the horizon may need to not be level to accommodate a better composition of a subject, keeping the horizon level when possible is good practice.

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This is one example where the horizon isn’t level. We’ll fix it in the next part of this article.

How to Fix a Tilted Horizon with Photoshop

For a bonus addition to this feature article, here’s a short how-to on making a horizon level.

Step 1

Open an image with a horizon that’s not level. Instead of having to guess the angle to fix this at, here’s a short method that is lot more effective. You can use this image and save it to the computer and open in Photoshop.

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Step 2

Click-and-hold the Eyedropper tool to pull out the menu. Click on the Ruler tool.

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3 comments on “8 Tips for Shooting Landscapes with Horizons”

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