Horizons & Verticals
We’re starting our weekly topics with something fundamental, but it can dramatically impact the look of your photograph. We will explore how the angle from which we hold our phone or camera affects the lines and edges in the image.
We’ll get the obvious one out of the way: Horizons.
Most of the time, you want the horizon to be level. A slightly wonky horizon tends to draw the eye, especially for someone who likes photography, and it will immediately distract from your actual photograph. It’s a bit like the visual equivalent of nails on a blackboard.
Luckily, your phone and most digital cameras have a grid you can turn on to help with composition. On the iPhone, it’s in Settings > Camera > Grid. This displays a 3x3 ‘noughts & crosses’ grid, perfect for checking your image's horizon and other lines.
However, sometimes, you might want to tilt the horizon in a photo deliberately, for dramatic effect—and this is perfectly okay; we won’t judge! The key is to make it obvious that this is an intentional feature… go big or go home, basically.
Now, the more subtle bit: Verticals.
The way your phone is tilted up or down will dramatically affect how vertical lines appear in your photograph:
If you tilt your phone so it looks up at your subject, vertical lines will appear to converge towards the top of the frame. A good example is looking up at trees or buildings. This can emphasise looming, tall subjects or make a person’s pose seem more heroic or important. On the other hand, if you’re shooting architecture or an indoor subject, it can be nearly as distracting as the wonky horizon.
If your phone is tilted to look down at your subject, the opposite occurs, and lines appear to spread out towards the top of the frame. This can be used to emphasise certain parts of the image for dramatic effect, or make a subject seem small, dwarfed by its surroundings. But, it can look awkward when taking pictures of children or pets (it's best to be at their eye level) and it will mess with the vertical lines of indoor photographs.
So, how do you straighten things up? Hold the phone so that it is perfectly upright, parallel to the walls, trees, people or whatever it is you are shooting. The grid will help you check that your verticals are vertical, and many phones and cameras have an electronic level you can switch on to tell you how your phone is tilted. Settings > Camera > Level on the iPhone.
For very tricky shots, or where getting your lines right is critically important, using tripod or a tabletop stand to keep your camera steady is a good idea.
Resources
Here’s a helpful video by Mike Browne, which nicely illustrates how to control your vertical lines in camera.
And another by Matthew Anderson, which is a bit more didactic (the target audience is professional architectural photographers) but has some useful material at the beginning.
This week’s assignments…
Your brief for this week’s daily photos is to explore how holding the phone affects horizontal and vertical lines. Play around with your phone, and watch how lines shift as you move it. The object of this exercise is to get our eyes tuned in to the lines in our photographs and how they move. Once you notice it, you won’t unsee it!
Let’s see photographs that use this to good effect. A dramatic tilted horizon—maybe to help emphasise action or a moving subject. Use diverging verticals to introduce a bit of drama to woodland or city scenes or to make something look tiny. Take an indoor photo with perfectly aligned walls and doorframes—bonus points for pulling this off; it can be tricky!
