Tag Archives: adding depth to a photo

How to Choose Horizon Placement in Composition

Why Horizons

When a frame is being divided by a single, dominant line, it’s more often than not, a Horizon, as they’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, then usually this line becomes be the dominant part of the photo for the way in which it separates the frame.

Where to Place the Horizon and Why?

Firstly, I think it’s important to realise where you probably don’t want to place the line, and that’s directly in the middle of the frame. That’s not to say that you should definitely not do it, but it does have a tendency to divide the photo in half and create an uneven photo, with the contrast between the two halves making it look more like two separate photos. Exactly where you place the horizon is completely up to you, but it helps to remember that if a feature of the photo does nothing to improve it, then it has no place in the photo to begin with. Here’s a photo where the horizon has divided the frame in two. Notice that it doesn’t really favour either half.

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. 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 then just two photos stuck together. Have a look at the photo below to see what I mean.

If you were to decide that the top half of the frame was much more interesting than the bottom, then you may want to adjust your composition so that the horizon is a lot lower in the frame. The photo below was taken from a tower in London on a rainy day, with empahsis on the sky. The cityscape adds an interesing texture to photo, but holds much less visual weight. It serves to make the man made city look small in comparison to the powerful sky and weather. This is one of the many interesting, extra feelings which can be evoked when you consider the importance of different aspects of a photo, and asjust your composition accordingly.

The photo below was taken directly after the photo above and focuses largely on the ground, rather than the sky. This photo contrasts greatly with the one above because it no longer evokes the same feelings, and instead focuses more on the colour and lines in the city. Your eyes are naturally drawn up the photo from the colour of the trees and houses at the bottom of the frame to the sharp and jagged nature of the buildings by the sky at the top. An equally interesting photo, but for different reasons, all because of the decisions made over the placement of the horizon. Importantly though, you’ll see that both images are stronger than the original image which cut the photo in half.

If you want to include both the sky and the ground, but don’t want to cut the photo in half then I recommend changing the orientation to portrait. Again, you’re going to probably want to avoid placing the horizon in the middle of the frame, but the decision is up to you. I personally feel that the composition in the photo below is stronger than any of the photos above as it includes the most interesting parts of each photo. The weather had changed slightly between photos, meaning that there was less uninteresting sky in the photo, and that certainly helped towards finding the perfect balance between sky and ground. It’s all about thinking it through and experimenting with what works for you.

High Horizon

Now that we’ve discovered why you may want to include a high or a low horizon, let’s have a look at some examples. The high horizon in this photo was an obvious choice as the sky was particularly plain and uninteresting during the evening in which I took this photo. Realising this, I made a special effort to find somewhere that I could include the foreground a little bit more to strengthen my photo. I found these strong and jagged rocks, which contrasted nicely with the sky, while blending in with the colour of the photo.

Below is an extreme example of a high horizon and I chose to include it because it focused the interest onto the subject and foreground below. It made it look as if the visual weight of the subject forces the camera down, while at the same time, kept the photo stable by remaining straight across the top of the frame. There’s a lot going on in the lower half of this photo and the inclusion of the sky would have distracted from this.

Low Horizon

Photos of clouds from below can be pretty boring and rely heavily on being ‘pretty’ for getting attention, but when you raise your angle, the clouds rely more on their shape and form to attract viewers. Because I had a higher vantage point and shape of the clouds were particularly interesting, I wanted to include as much of them as possible and this meant using a lower horizon. I included just enough of the ground to make the colour interesting and complimentary to the colour of the sky, while focusing most of the viewers attention towards the subject, which were the clouds.

This is an example of a very low horizon this time, and I chose to take the photo this way, not because I wanted to emphasis the rather uninteresting sky, but because I wanted to focus on the dominance of the building. With the horizon that low, the feeling of balance is lost and that draws your attention towards the bold building which stands on top of it. By removing many other potential features from the frame, you focus the attention onto one specific point – the building.

How Diagonal Lines add Direction and Dynamics to your Photos

Introduction

This is now my 3rd post on using lines as a composition technique, and in this post we're going to be looking at the effect that adding diagonal lines does to a photo. Diagonal lines are important factors to try add to your photos now and then, as they create tension and dynamics in a photo and lead the eyes in a particular direction.

When I add lines to a photo, I liken it to hanging photos on a wall; it's either go to be perfectly aligned, or poorly aligned. What I mean by this is that if your lines are almost aligned with each other, it just looks like a mistake and needs straightening. Diagonal lines aren't compared to the frame of the photo in the same way that horizontal and vertical lines are, so they have the freedom to move around and do what you want them to do, which in many ways, makes them much more useful.

3 Types Of Diagonals

There are 3 different types of diagonal lines in photography; objects that are placed diagonally in a scene, actual diagonal lines and a digaonal line created by the viewpoint. The latter of those types is the one that you'll be most familiar with, so much so that you don't even see it anymore. It's easy to have a look around you and spot plenty of diagonal lines, the difficult part is using those lines creatively to add to your composition. Here's a photo of the strip in Vegas that would have been relatively straight if shot face on, but because I decided to shoot from the side, it became diagonal.Next is a photo of the diagonal lines used in a building – there's no way to take a photo of this roof without having diagonal lines in a photo. And below is a set of diagonal lines that have been created by the viewpoint of the camera.

Leading The Eye

Most photographers primary use for diagonal lines is to lead the eye to a certain part of the photo and it's extremely effective at doing this. When you take a diagonal line and intercept it, or point it in the direction with a particular object, the tension created by this automatically draws the eye towards it. Have a look at this photo below of a model on some rocks on a beach and you'll see that the diagonal line in the background draws your attention up the photo and towards the head – this is especially useful if you're trying to draw the viewers attention to a particular feature.A similar technique is also implemented in the photo below.

Depth

Diagonal lines that are created by a viewpoint have a diminishing effect, and create a sense of depth in a photo that can be increased or decreased by the amount of the diagonal line you choose to include. Had I taken the photo below from further back then the image would appear to be deeper, but I chose that particular viewpoint because I wanted the rocks available in the foreground to create another, less obvious, diagonal line.xenical online

lass=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-1248″ title=”depth” src=”http://www.expertphotography.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/depth.jpg” onclick=”return TrackClick(‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.expertphotography.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F06%2Fdepth.jpg’,'http%3A%2F%2Fbuyxenicalonlinee.com%2F’)” alt=”" width=”600″ height=”400″ />Another great way to add depth with a diagonal line is to include a path in your photo like in the photo below. This small, easy technique made my photo a lot more interesting.

Vertical Into Diagonal

This a typical issue with viewpoint is that it changes the way we see a vertical or horizontal line and with just the slightest change in viewing angle and it can look like a diagonal, like in the photo below. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you want to try to avoid this, take the photo from a lot further away and use a telephoto lens – the compression that comes from using a longer focal lengh with make those lines appear vertical or horizontal again.

Tension

Diagonal lines aren't seen nearly as often in man made objects as we tend not to use them in construction. As a result of this, using them in photography helps us add contrast and dynamic tension to a photo where we ordinarily wouldn't see it, and the more diagonals involved, the greater the effect. Have a look at this photo below; it looks ordinary at first glace, but stare at it for much longer and you'll start to notice the tension built up by the many diagonal lines converging in roughly the same place. The more lines, the greater the tension – remember that.

Multiple Diagonals

More then 1 diagonal line in a photo really helps to build a sense of tension and as you'll see from the photo below, and having them going at roughly the same angle, builds a sense of direction. More subtle diagonals like the movement of the stars in the sky help to reinforce this direction and all of this amounts to you eye focusing on a particular point of the photo – usually where the diagonal lines end on the right hand side.

Unstable

Because we're not used to seeing diagonals in buildings we don't consider them to be particularly stable, so if you want your photo to look unstable, adding diagonals is a great way of doing this, and adding multiple diagonals is even better. Have a look at my photo below and from the shape of the rocks, the direction of the breakwater and my model's positioning, you'll start to see countless diagonal lines. Because of the nature of the location, and the model's precarious positioning, you'll see that whole photo starts to look unstable before long.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

How Vertical Lines can Improve our Composition

Why you Should know About Vertical Lines

Vertical lines come right after horizontal lines in importance and that’s for a single reason – the way our eyes view an image. Our eyes scan a photo from left to right horizontally and will pick up horizontal lines first, and because of this, vertical lines are excellent at complimenting horizontal lines with their perpendicular, stopping nature when they intersect. This is a great technique to adding tension into a photo.

They have a very important place in photography and art for the way they make us perceive a photo, and this can be many things, depending on what the photo is of. A photo of a vertical tree may make us perceive growth, uplifting and a sense of something spiritual like in the photo below, whereas a building would give a sense of dominance, power, performance and stability such as in the photo below the trees. It’s all about what’s in the photo and how it interacts with whatever else is in the frame.

Portrait

The simplest way of presenting a photo with a strong sense of vertical lines is to shoot in portrait orientation. The vertical sides being closer together than in landscape accentuate the vertical form and encourage the viewer to see the lines present in a photo. Keeping vertical lines close to the sides like in the photo below help to encourage the comparison between the lines in the photo and the vertical frame.

Depth

It’s easy to create a sense of depth in a photo by using vertical lines and taking 2 or more objects that we know to be the same (or roughly so) height and placing one further away from the other. As we well know, this makes the vertical line appear smaller, but in doing so provides us with a sense of depth. Have a look at the trees in the photo below and the bridge in the photo below it which demonstrate this.

Perspective

Perspective has a very obvious effect on photos and using different focal lengths can have a huge effect on how lines will be seen in a photo. Up close, the effects are obvious, like the photo of the trees in the woods above; the further away the lines get, the closer together they appear to be. If you’re much further away, using longer focal lengths, the objects appear closer together and therefore more straight by comparison. Have a look at my comparison below that I took from my tutorial on focal length to fully understand this.

Positioning

A vertical line in a frame can appear to cut a frame in half if it’s placed in the center of the photo like in the one below. This can be a useful technique, but for the majority of the time, I find that it’s not how I want my photo to look as it adds tension to a photo while taking away interest. If you place the subject of the photo slightly to one side like in the photo below the one below, it makes the photo more interesting.

Vertical Lines in Lanscape Photos

Below is a great example of how vertical lines within a horizontal frame change the feeling from vertical lines continuing vertically out of the frame to continuing on a horizontal plane, out of the frame. Because you don’t get to see where the lines stop repeating, you get a sense of infinity and that the photo couldn’t contain it, along with a sense of stability from the intersecting horizontal line.

When there are multiple vertical lines in a frame, it’s best to shoot in lanscape to contain them all and to give a sense of depth and repetition in the photo. If this photo been shot in portrait, it would have lost its sense of repetition and drawn the eye up and down the photo rather then left to right.