Essential kit no. 6…

Hot shoe spirit bubble - stay on the straight and level!

This may look like a useless gizmo, but if you shoot outdoors with a tripod regularly – it’ll save you a lot of heartache and photoshop fixing later.

 

I was trawling through the internet a few months ago, looking at other photographer’s images and I found a site for a Canadian photographer. His images were well composed, full if colour and interest, but in almost every frame the horizon line was out of true. The images were all dropping to the right by 10–15 degrees and in one really obvious case the sea ran at near to 45 degrees.

I was at a loss to understand why someone would take the trouble to put up an extensive gallery of their work but overlook so obvious an error. As they all dropped to the same side – I suspect he was shooting hand held and muscle memory was getting the better of him.

Anyway, we’ve all taken an image that’s a bit skewiff from time to time and the usual fix is to rotate the image to square in photoshop before re-cropping to square up. The down side to this is that you will be making your image slightly smaller, and the more it’s out of true – the more you have to crop off to fix it. If you’re badly out, it will impact on your composition.

Hence the spirit bubble! Slide one of these into your camera’s flash hot shoe and you can instantly double check the alignment. 

I’ve seen these in various configurations – 1, 2 and 3 bubble versions – the 2 bubble made sense to me as you only really need to check for horizontal and vertical alignment.

They're on sale at various prices ranging from £2 to £15. I got mine from Amazon and it was around the £6 mark. It works great and does what it says on the tin. Fit it and forget it! Don't use it if you regularly use the camera's built in flip-up flash as it will prevent it from deploying, but this really doesn't factor if you're shooting outdoors in natural light.

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