Get Your Horizon Line Straight, Method 1

Having a crooked horizon line is one of the “Seven Deadly Sins of Landscape Photography,” and yes, you can fix it later in Lightroom or Photoshop (or wherever), but that requires you to rotate your photo, and then you have to crop away those white gaps that are created in the corners. So, basically, you’re recomposing your image after the fact, and not because there’s a better image within the image you took—you’re doing it because you messed up when you took the shot. Why not just get it right in the first place, and then you don’t have to fix it later? One way to do that is to buy an inexpensive bubble level. This slides right into the flash hot shoe on the top of your camera (as seen here), and it gives you the type of bubble level you’d find in a traditional hardware store level. You can use this to make sure your camera is perfectly straight when you take the shot, saving you untold toil and trouble later in post (that’s short for post-processing, which is long for doing something in Lightroom or Photoshop).