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Levelling With Reality

In the photos of the New York City skyline, I was shooting from the Staten Island Ferry and I was bobbing up and down trying to get a steady shot. When I took the photo, the city was falling to the left (top photo). After correcting the horizon, the photo is much more pleasing (bottom photo). Photos by Chad Ecklof

Welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk Photography!

Before we talk about photography today, I’d like to share a bit of my time at sea in the Navy. I remember when I was stationed aboard the USS Valley Forge, a guided missile Ticonderoga Class cruiser and we embarked on what would be the first of many long periods out to sea. My first happened to be a six month cruise over to the Persian Gulf and back. Unlike the cruise ships that take you on vacation, there are no windows whatsoever on the ship except on the bridge and in the Captain’s quarters. The work center that I was assigned to was on the very top level of the ship and to the aft (that’s the back for all you landlubbers). My first days at sea were pretty uneventful until we hit our first weather event and the waves started reaching up and pushing back against the ship as she cut through the Pacific. I remember sitting in my work center and feeling the motion of the ship. There’s something very unnerving about knowing you’re moving around and not having any idea in which way. My supervisors came up to check on me and saw that I must have been turning a few shades of green, similar to the cuisine of mystery meat that they were serving on the chow line, and they suggested that I go out and stand on the weather decks for a few minutes and stare at the horizon. To my great pleasure, I was back in good form in just a few minutes and ready to get back to work. This was my first lesson in the effects of visual references and how they work on your other senses.

Okay, so where am I going with this weird intro to a photography column? As a photographer, you will make decisions on whether or not to create tension in the viewer by intentionally placing subjects in strange positions or cropping in unexpected ways. Doing so strengthens the artistic value of the image and invokes internal responses from those viewing the final work. That being said, it’s important that you pay close attention to those times when you should not send your friends and family into a moment of uneasiness and that happens when you show them a photo of a landscape or an outdoor portrait and the horizon is falling off one side of the picture.

Believe it or not, some people get nuts when they see a photo and they are immediately drawn to the fact that your ocean or lake looks like it should be spilling off the side. Others will attempt to straighten your pictures hanging on your wall if they notice that the trees are slanted to one side. These visual cues are very powerful and can ruin a great photo if you don’t take a moment to correct them. It may seem mundane and almost goofy to obsess over something so tiny, but you want to be able to present your work to your friends and family without them having the very first words they say as “it’s crooked!”

Your editing software will almost always have a levelling tool. In most cases, you simply choose the tool and then click one side of the horizon, then draw a line across the horizon or simply click the other side and it will make the necessary adjustments and crops to give you a straight horizon line. Sometimes, you don’t have a defined horizon line, such as in a photo of a wooded area or when there is a building dominating the scene so you would then pay attention to any vertical lines that you know should exist closest to the center of the picture. In the photos of the New York City skyline, I was shooting from the Staten Island Ferry and I was bobbing up and down trying to get a steady shot. When I took the photo, the city was falling to the left (top photo). After correcting the horizon, the photo is much more pleasing (bottom photo).

Depending on what lens you were using or how you were holding your camera or smart phone, you may experience some other anomalies such as keystone perspective or horizontal or vertical shift. Keystone perspective is when the sides pinch in at the top or bottom because your camera was held at an up or down angle when you took the shot. Keeping your camera level and on a tripod is the easiest way to prevent this from happening when you are shooting. The same can happen if you shot with your camera slightly pointed to the right or left of the center subject causing the keystone effect to pinch off the sides. In the photo of Trinity Church, New York City’s oldest, you can see that the buildings on the sides appear to be falling into the center of the image. This is because I was shooting very close to the subjects and with a wide angle and pointing the camera slightly upward. This is an example of keystoning.

More advanced software will have tools to handle keystoning and other perspective issues that happen with various lenses and shooting scenarios and can help you get your shot on the level and looking good.

I’m not telling you to go over every single image and ensure your horizons and lines are perfectly vertical or horizontal. Sometimes you want to crop your images to create a particular feeling or to lead the viewer’s eye through the image in an unexpected way. Such is the case with the photo taken at the Porcelain Bus Drivers concert where I intentionally cropped the image to invoke a feeling even though the sign in the background is an obvious indicator, along with the microphone stand, that the world is slightly off level in the shot.

You are the master of your photography domain and it’s always going to be up to you to decide how to present your work. Just make sure you’re not making your viewers sea sick with slanted horizons or they may go home with a touch of that green look that I had on my first cruise aboard the Valley Forge.

Until next week, happy shooting!

Is there a topic that you’d like to learn more about? Send feedback, share your photos, or offer topic suggestions to talkphotos@ecklof.com. If you’re looking for a place to connect with local photographers in Chautauqua County, search for the group “Shoot ‘n Share Chautauqua” on Facebook.

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