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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Bubble levels are great for carpentry, but are they worth using in photography?…