Composition Part 2 – Leading Lines; not what Bogey said to Hepburn

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Much has been written about lines & leading lines and you can find good stuff and bad stuff on the web.  There are places that will give you mechanical rules and others  that are not concrete enough to understand. Hopefully, this will be somewhere in between.

Lines play several critical roles in photos and in many ways are THE defining element in black and white photography.  But first, what is a ‘line’ ?   Most us intuitively know what a line is, there are several cases to be aware of

This granger image illustrates two of them; first that lines do not always have hard edges, but as in this image the boundaries are soft.  The second point is that edges are not necessarily a  dark stick on a light field, but can occur where there are color transitions.

Lines play several critical roles in photos

• Lines help define shape of objects
• Lines provide texture

Next time you go to take a picture, before you put the eye to camera, look around and identify the lines that you see.  The image below is mostly about lines.It was converted to black and white to emphasize the lines, although that is not how I thought of it, just that it looked better in B&W.

Leading lines are a special case of lines.  Besides the normal role of lines, leading lines help make a photo work.

• Leading lines lead the eye into the picture
• Leading lines prevent the eye from leaving the picture
• Leading lines indicate what is important in the picture
• Contribute to the dynamic (energetic) or passive (calm) feeling in a picture

When I am taking photos, I don’t think of these  concepts, but rather ask myself, where are there strong lines that I can make work for the picture?

Below are some examples:Here the aspens lead from the bottom corners into the image quite strongly.  Those strong lines give some energy and interest to what could have been a more ho hum static picture.    Diagonal lines tend to lend energy to a picture while horizontal and vertical lines (less so) tend to make it more static.

The image below was also used for a framing example, but  there are several things to note here.Notice the triangle of sky, those lines lead into the picture, while the lines above Laurie that define the hollow prevent the eye from leaving the photo.  Also note that most of the lines in this picture are diagonal lines, and lead to Laurie, or prevent the eye from wandering off the picture.

The classic leading lines are “S” curves.  They are more pleasant to the eye than straight line usually.   Curves can work well as leading line,  for instance when shoot a scene with people in the distance, put the people at the apex of the curve.  Below are two photos showing leading lines.

The final photo I want to leave you with is this one; one of the “rules” is that you don’t want strong lines coming out of someone’s head.  I would argue, that in this case it is a leading line and supports the photo, although with slightly humorous overtones.There is a classic exercise to help understand lines; quickly sketch the major lines in a photo, no more than 20 seconds.  Do this for 100 photos, and you will start having a reasonable understanding of lines.

Alternatively, look at the slideshow below and quickly identify lines.

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