We show that surfaces such that the natural projections of the unit normal bundles are harmonic morphisms are composed of minimal points and totally umbilical points. As its application, we find a harmonic map from the torus to the complex quadric in $CP^3$ such that the projection map of the associated sphere bundle constructed by Gudmundsson is not a harmonic morphism. This contrasts sharply with the situation for holomorphic maps. We also establish sufficient conditions for reducing the codimension of an isometric immersion with conformal second fundamental form.