Where to place the horizon? Painters have traditionally pushed the placement of the horizon to extremes to achieve artistic effect as this image from Anne Marie McInerney, a cork based painter shows –
To my untutored eye it appears to be less so in the case of photographers although Ansel Adams frequently used a very high placement of the horizon to give impact to the landscape of his images. A good example is Canyon de Chelly National Monument from 1942 in which the sky above the horizon barely accounts for 10% of the vertical in the image –
http://www-tc.pbs.org/nationalparks/media/photos/09000/S9847-lg.jpg.
Exercise 12, which is part of the ‘Dividing the Frame’ project in the OCA Art of Photography course, is concerned with horizon placement. Five images were captured to work through this exercise and these are below. Each is preceded by a short commentary on what was going through my mind as the images were arranged and I conclude with a short reflection on the exercise.
Both the first and last images are examples of extreme placement of the horizon. The rationale for choosing the first horizon placement was that the dark foreboding sky had enough interest to justify giving it prominence over the beach beneath. If the image were to have been converted to black and white and worked in processing package the interest in the sky could have been deepened further.
The second image has a more conventional placement with the beach making up about one quarter of the vertical dimension thus showing just enough of the beach to generate some interest in the lower portion of the image.
The third image has roughly equal proportions of land a sky with the horizon placed half way along the vertical. In this image neither sky nor beach dominates attention and the image, in my opinion lacks tension.
The fourth image, with its placement of the horizon roughly three quarters of the way up the vertical now starts to allow the brown and black patterns in the beach in the foreground to generate depth to the image as well as much greater interest in the foreground. The image starts to become interesting.
The final image, with the horizon placed towards the extreme top of the image allows the greater foreground detail to come into play and gives a much greater sense of depth to the image.
Michael Freeman in The Photographer’s Eye (Ilex, 2007) suggest that there is no ideal position for the horizon (p26) and that there are good reasons for experimenting with different positions. In the case of the foregoing images an extreme low positioning would work to focus on the dark, cloud filled sky, provided that the effect could be deepened through some manipulation. In the absence of that possibility, the high placement of the horizon to bring out the patterned beach provides the most interest.
Jacques-Henri Lartgue was well known for his images of the French seasides. As a little exercise I trawled through a selection of his seaside images on Google images to find was there a common thread to the placement of the horizon. While most seemed to have the horizon placed mid way along the vertical, the dynamism in the images was invariably heightened by significant action in the foreground thus rendering the placement of the horizon less relevant. See
for an example.
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