Positioning The Horizon

This exercise involved taking photographs with the horizon in different places within the frame.  The pictures were taken at Jumeirah Public Beach in Dubai.

My first picture was taken with the horizon roughly 1/3 from the top.  This was the natural place for me without putting too much thought into it.  The horizon is straight but the converging diagonals to the left make it look like it is sloping.

Looking at the original picture, I decided that there was too much foreground and this made the picture unbalanced in the sense that the eye is not naturally drawn to the sea.  This picture takes the horizon to the centre of the frame. As a picture of the beach, I prefer this to the previous one as there is a better balance between the sea, the sky and the beach.

For the next picture I lowered the horizon so that the beach was not visible at all.  I don’t really like this picture as the people are shown standing but you cannot see what they are standing on – it makes one feel like the bottom of the picture is incorrectly cut off.

For the next picture, I lowered the horizon even further so that now the standing people are not visible.  This is a better picture than the previous one.  The picture emphasises the vast sky but since there is nothing in the sky at all, it does not make a particularly interesting shot.

Lastly I put the horizon right at the top of the shot.  This shots has a very strong emphasis on the foreground.  In this case the beach.  As the original shot was intended to show the sea, this is not a shot that I like.