Keeping Your Horizons Level - Mason Vranish Photography

Home	Keeping Your Horizons Level In three words: Buy a level. No matter how careful you may think you are, without one invariably some if not most of your pictures containing water or level horizons will be slanted, necessitating cropping away image area to flatten the horizon. The problem has its roots in vision perception. Your standard camera viewfinder has you looking at a scene with one eye. Using a tripod, if you compose a picture using your right eye and then look through the camera with your left, the scene will appear tilted to the right. Of course the opposite is true if you had first composed the picture with your left eye. Aware of this, you could attempt to correct each composition by averaging the difference between your two visions. Sometimes this might work, but I think its more like playing pin the tail on the donkey. Nor is this problem constrained to 35mm cameras. My Yashica has a waist level finder that allows you to view the scene with both eyes, in addition to a grid screen. Keeping things straight is easier with the Yashica, but unless the horizon is placed right under a grid line, its still not a perfect arrangement. Enter the level. There are different routes you could go here, from crafting your own to buying one designed to fit in the camera's hot shoe. The hot shoe type is of course more expensive but its design allows easy use in both horizontal and vertical compositions. For cameras without a hot shoe, the best arrangement I've found seems to be to buy a cheap $2 level at a hardware store, strip the bubble level out, and hot glue the level to the camera. < Back to Photo and Hiking Tips
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