Last week’s challenge had you working on black & white landscape photography. I hope you came away from that with an image or two you’re pleased with. This week, I’d like you to take another look at those images. Did any of them just a little…off to you, but maybe you weren’t sure why?

Try taking a closer look at the horizon line in your photos. An off-kilter horizon, or just lines in your composition that are slightly misaligned, can ruin an otherwise great photo. Think about the trouble you’ll go to in your house to straighten a picture frame…and how absolutely annoying it can be when the photo gets bumped ever so slightly out of alignment. The same thing goes when you’re composing your photos.

Consider the following examples:

In each set of images, the photo on the right probably seems a little better. The water in the first image of the fishing boat on the pond slopes from the upper left down & to the right. Your brain intuitively knows that ponds don’t behave that way, so the image just doesn’t feel right.

The first farmhouse image has been rotated just a little counter-clockwise. It’s not a bad image, in & of itself, but it feels just a little unbalanced. The rotated image almost works, except for the grain silo. Just like the pond in the first set of images, your brain knows that with the notable exception of certain towers in Italy, buildings are supposed to be straight up & down, so the image on the right ends up just feeling better.

Now, all of this is not to say that every horizon line in every landscape photo should be perfectly aligned and absolutely horizontal. Images with hills or mountain ranges might not cooperate for a perfectly straight & level horizon. And there may be times when you want to create an off-balance or off-kilter image for artistic reasons.

But your assignment this week, should you choose to accept it, is to be mindful of the horizon in your landscape images and create an intentionally straight, level, and balanced horizon image.