If you’re showing the horizon, then you’re almost certainly showing the sky, and the sky is not always as photogenic as we’d like it to be.  Most every time I’ve been in Yosemite Valley, for example, I have found that photos of Half Dome are marred by jet contrails from commercial aviation.  Nowadays, with a Healing Brush in Photoshop, getting rid of an unwanted contrail is easily done.  Smog can be another detractor in a sky.  Even amorphous high clouds can wash out producing an unattractive white sky in a landscape.

 

To capture this image, I was on the Beartooth Highway at an elevation of nearly 11000 feet.  From that high vantage point, it was fairly easy to aim the camera downward to keep the sky out of the frame.  Helping matters, I used a 100mm (modestly telephoto) lens to narrow the field of vision.  An added bonus to keeping the sky out of this image is that the exposure was much simpler; the bright sky would have created a scene with too much dynamic range, and detail in the lower values would have been lost.

 

So, is it cheating to leave such distractions out of a picture?  It seems right in line with Dewitt Jones’ practice of finding what it is about a scene that captures his attention and then eliminating all distractions.