The slightly upward camera angle used here is sufficient to place the horizon slightly below the middle of the frame, but the horizon is almost entirely obscured by the rising sand dune in the foreground.  In fact, aside from a small glimpse at a plateau on the left edge of the frame, the photograph is comprised of foreground and sky, with no land form in the background.

 

What I saw and wanted to capture was the beautiful meeting of the orange sand with dried flowers and the cloud-embossed sky.  As I walked around, I saw the plateau in the background and determined that this was a distraction from the essence of the image I wanted to communicate.  I worked to position the camera in such a way that the plateau was no longer a distraction.

 

One technical advantage of such composition is that you don’t need as much depth-of-field.  Only the foreground really needs to be in focus; the background (sky and clouds) would have been fine with a softer, out-of-focus rendition, so there was no strong reason to be able to focus to infinity.  Working with a strong wide-angle lens at f/16 easily gave me depth-of-field I needed for the features in the foreground.  Using the wide-angle lens also made it easier to compose the photograph — I was able to place the camera low, close to the ground; capturing similar features from a greater distance away (using a less wide-angle lens) would have required a much taller tripod or even a ladder.

 

Although the horizon is a strong contributor to a great many landscapes, there are times when the horizon can become a distraction.  By making use of sand dunes, mounds, hills, or other features which extend upward from the otherwise level landscape, we create something of a still-life table — a stage on which to pose a simple subject against a simple background, enabling us to focus the viewer’s attention on the very essence of the beauty that initially caught our attention.