A Beginner’s Guide To Leading Lines In Photography
April 15, 2011The technique of using leading lines in photography takes composition to a new level. You can use this tool to guide the spectator’s gaze to a particular point of focus, giving your image a pleasingly structured layout.
At its most basic, the idea of this technique is that when you show a spectator a strong line in a picture, the eye of that viewer will naturally be drawn to follow that line. It can be almost anything, including a natural found object like a tree, or even a strong shadow. You can also make use of a structure like a telephone pole, or a manmade road stretching across the image. When shooting photos of people, you can arrange their pose so that the body itself draws attention to a particular focal point in the picture.
You can use this technique to control the viewer’s experience in a way that creates harmony or symmetry, by using one line to create a peaceful narrative. Or, you can create tension and drama by having intersecting or competing lines that fight for a spectator’s focus. When you master this compositional trick, you have vastly more control over how the emotional content of your photos will be perceived.
Sometimes this will naturally happen in a picture, almost as a happy accident, such as if you were to shoot a road heading into a setting sun on the horizon line. You may also choose a shot with this technique in mind, such as when you pose a person’s portrait so that shadows or the branches of a nearby tree grab the viewer’s attention, and meaningfully draw the focus to the face of the person who you are trying to capture.
This idea is useful not only when taking the pictures, but when editing them later. When at the stage of deciding whether or not to crop a photo, many photographers will look to see whether that kind of framing can bring a line to a viewer’s attention and create a more powerful image, even if that was not intended at the time the photo was shot. Another way to bring this visual aspect out in an existing picture is by changing the contrast or the white balance to make some elements grab more attention.
This technique can help you lend motion to a photograph, as you make the visual journey dynamic and exciting by the way you lead the spectator’s experience of the image. If you wish to draw the eye beyond the edge of the photo’s frame, you can use strong lines to suggest a focal point just outside the picture itself.
Many formal training courses include particular tasks that are meant to help emerging photographers master this technique. If you are doing photography as a hobby, or are teaching yourself the medium, you may benefit from concentrating on this tool during a particular session, or a period of your work, as a way to integrate it into your growing artistic abilities. It isn’t difficult to master, and can prove very beneficial to your photography skills as they continue to develop.
Using leading lines in photography can give your pictures more emotional and compositional power. It’s little wonder that many books about this medium cover this technique, and that so many artists at both the hobbyist and professional level make use of a relatively simple way to guide their viewers’ experience of seeing an image.
Parker Michaels is a new media consultant and freelance photographer. For more information on leading lines in photography, visit www.photo-junkie.com.
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