Why Bubble Levels Are a Waste of Money
Posted by Aaron on October 10th, 2007There may be a time and a place for a real bubble level, but I happen to think that it’s in carpentry. I’ll tell you why.
!!http://www.naturescapes.net/retail/HakubaLevel1.jpg!!
In this day and age, you can buy nearly any piece of photographic equipment with a bubble level built into it somewhere. Tripods, ball heads, camera brackets, and even little standalone levels that clip into your hot shoe like the one shown above (made by Hakuba). Do I think these products are clever? Absolutely. Do I recommend purchasing one? Not really.
If you’re building a house, making sure things are level is pretty important. You probably wouldn’t want to walk uphill from your living room to your kitchen, for example. In photography, however, we’re talking about making art, about expressing emotion, about things far divorced from the mechanics of building robust structures for people to live in.
The bubble level started showing up in photography equipment to help people level their images with the precept that keeping your image level is a good thing. I can’t argue with that; if you have a noticeable horizon line in your image and it isn’t wildly and purposefully off-kilter, it should darn well be horizontal. If it is wildly and purposefully off-kilter, you don’t really need a bubble level to do that.
There are three reasons I believe these bubble levels are useless:
- Bubble levels integrated into tripods are fundamentally worthless because they only tell you if your tripod is level, and unless you have your camera screwed directly onto your tripod (please, please answer “no” to that), it doesn’t do you much good. A tripod can be very steady and secure without being level.
- A bubble level on your camera does not guarantee that it is level with the surface of the ground (read: what you see), but rather that it is level gravitationally, which may be different. If you are shooting a horizon line that is actually a subtle hill or other topographical feature, the bubble level may actually make your image appear not to be level.
- Fundamentally, your final image may appear to be level or not level based on features of the composition, including hills, vertical elements such as trees or man-made structures, and so forth. A bubble level isn’t savvy to composition.
Basically, bubble levels only help you if you’re shooting a water horizon, which positively must be gravitationally level because it’s water, or if you’re shooting a scene where gravitationally level is exactly what you want regardless of any other topographical features, such as wide angles of mountain ranges, deserts, and so on.
For my money, I’d rather adjust the frame by eye than buy a doohickey to do it for me and hope that my situation lends itself to the device’s abilities.
Okay, so, how do you level the frame without a bubble level? Here are a couple of tricks I use:
- Use your autofocus points. If it’s daytime and you can see your autofocus points, align them with elements in the scene to make sure they’re level. the AF points in your viewfinder are guaranteed to be level with respect to the frame, so it gives you a visual hand-hold for lining up horizons and buildings and everything else.
- Squint. Seriously. One of the more important habits I’ve picked up over the years is to take stock of the entire frame as a composition, which can be hard to do when your face is pressed up against the camera and you have one eye closed and you’re possibly contorting yourself to lean over to where your tripod is perched. If there is a horizon and a tree that should appear to be horizontal and vertical, respectively, pay careful attention to how they appear to be oriented within the frame as a whole rather than how the horizon or the tree line up with AF points or edges of the frame on their own.
- Fix it in post-processing. I know, that sounds like a cop out, but it’s your last line of defense. If you’re going to be editing all of your photos anyway (as I’m sure you do), it’s a better investment to tweak the horizon a little in Lightroom than to buy a bubble level and wind up having to tweak it in Lightroom anyway since the horizon wasn’t gravitationally level in the first place.
At the end of the day, having one of those little gizmos is probably a net benefit if you know when to use it and when not to use it. But for my money, I’d rather concern myself with the aesthetics of the composition as it appears through the viewfinder than whether or not my camera is gravitationally level or not.
Edit! I ran into a very congenial gentleman here in the Great Smoky Mountains who was on leave from the Army, preparing for his third tour in Iraq, camping and photographing in the park. He was shooting some panoramas with his D200 and told me that a hot shoe bubble level is essential in that case. Now, I could probably go out on a limb and argue against that point, but instead I will concede that shooting panoramas sounds like a pretty good reason to use a bubble level. One of the few.
Why Bubble Levels Are a Waste of Money…
Bubble levels are great for carpentry, but are they worth using in photography?…
Bubble levels are extremely helpful in photographing paintings and artwork, tabletop product photos, and architectural photography (yes, some of us still use view cameras).
I used Rolleiflex TLR cameras for many years, and they had a grid etched into the big 2.25 inch viewscreen. I really miss that.
@monty
That’s a very good point! I should have mentioned that I really intended this editorial to be directed at landscape and outdoors photographers and I didn’t even consider the usefulness of a bubble level for indoor and tabletop work. Thanks for your insights.
I have to agree with your new-found military friend. If you’re shooting sequential landscape images that you intend to stitch together into a panorama, a bubble level is nearly indispensable. Can there really be a quantifiable difference betweeen a hot shoe level and one built onto the tripod? The focusing screen on my Olympus E-1 has a grid etched (?) into it, and I find it more than handy.
@Rich
In my opinion, a grid or some markings within the viewfinder is ten times more useful than a bubble level simply because those anchors relate directly to the composition itself rather than to the gravitational “levelness” of your camera, which may or may not jive with what you’re shooting.
One extreme example I thought of is shooting a panorama off a tower of some kind where you want to tilt your camera downward. A hot shoe level becomes useless in that situation, and although a tripod level may help you out a bit, you’re really better off swinging the camera around while looking through it to make sure you’ll frame all the highest and lowest points of interest.
Many SLR cameras now have focusing and grid screens available for them, and while they are expensive, they could prove to be worth their weight in gold when shooting things like panoramas. The 5D and 1-series Canon bodies have a couple of screens available from Canon, and screens for those and other cameras are also available from cool third-parties like Haoda.
[…] Why Bubble Levels Are a Waste of Money – I always have problems getting my horizons, or anything else, in my photos straight. After reading this article, I’m with the author. I don’t think a bubble level is going to help me that much, I’m better off using the three techniques he outlines. […]
Given the way the bubble level is installed on the Cannon Camera shown; I too would conclude it to be useless. It is currently mounted to the camera for a portrait shot not landscapes as shown, thus rendering it ineffectual. I own one of those hotshot levels, and while a nifty toy, I still mostly depend on my eye, to the viewfinder frame to decide the finished shot. Just wanted to let you know someone is actually paying attention to what is being presented.
Thanks, Gary.
The Hakuba level shown in the picture has both a horizontal as well as vertical bubble cylinder, though the horizontal one is difficult to see properly from the angle of the photograph because of the distortion of the clear acrylic.
That said, I still think these things are a waste of money.
I have read this article and, for the most part, agree with you. There are a lot of places a bubble level has little to no use. On the other hand, a lot of the arguments you make can also be said for any other photography tool. Take a camera’s built in exposure sensor for example. They are always a nice thing to have, but they aren’t always perfectly accurate. Should we stop using the exposure meter just because it isn’t always accurate? No. It isn’t always perfect, but it gets you in the ballpark. A photographer who knows their camera will know when to trust this tool and when to go with their instinct.
I take a lot of skyline pictures. They are mostly cityscapes at night. In a lot of places, there is no point of reference or horizon line to line your camera up with. You have roads, signs, trees and buildings in the way. You can go with the vertical sides of the building, but you soon find out that they aren’t always accurate. Those lines can be deceiving, especially when lining it up through a tiny viewfinder. Sure, the picture will look great in your viewfinder and on the small LCD screen. I have spent many nights taking picture for 2 or 3 hours from one location or another attempting to use my eye to get the shot straight. Then, I get home and find that most of my shots are just slightly off. Sure, I could post-process the pictures, but that tends to degrade the quality of a picture, almost adding a blurred look to the photographs. I would rather have a tool available to me so I can check and see if what I think is accurate is, in fact, accurate. I never become dependent on this tool and always go with my eye, but it still gives me a second opinion when I am standing on a bridge at 1am in 12 degree weather and am unsure if my eyes are playing tricks on me or not.
I am not going to say the bubble level in my hotshoe has solved all of my problems, but since I started using it, it has greatly cut down on uneven pictures.
I look at it this way: If I am building a table, I probably won’t need wire cutters. Do I have a pair in my toolbag? Absolutely!
@Jeff
Thanks for sharing your experience with bubble levels! I am on your side when it comes to the (limited) utility of bubble levels in landscape photography. There are definitely times and places where a bubble level is nothing short of indispensable.
One of my main points in writing this piece is that people tend to take things like bubble levels at face value. Just because the little air bubble rests serenely between the two lines doesn’t mean that the photograph will appear to be level in any way.
The biggest challenge that I’ve faced when it comes to leveling photographs is when there is a visual contention between a horizon-like line, such as the edge of a beach (which is not actually the horizon), and the vertical edges of buildings or trees. It can be a challenge to make the image seem balanced and in a state of rest, whether or not the image is technically, physically, level.
What you said about straightening images in post-production is most certainly true, too. Nevertheless, shooting at 12 megapixels seems to be enough to handle some light perspective adjustment without a noticeable loss of sharpness in my experience and I’ve done so many times with city skyline photographs in lieu of buying an expensive tilt/shift lens.
Thanks again for sharing, Jeff.