Knowing how to use leading lines in
When you look at an image, your eyes dart around to look for a message or focal point in it. Including a leading line to draw the viewer’s eye to your main subject, your photo will hold their attention.
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What are Leading Lines in Photography?
Leading lines are a powerful compositional tool that you can use to improve the framing, composition, and mood of your photos. While the composition is used in other art forms, the term leading lines is rarely used outside
Our brains are hardwired to unconsciously follow lines. As a photographer, you can use leading lines to your advantage. When you are aware of this, you know when someone is looking at your photograph, their eyes will follow the leading lines. If you place your main subject at the end of the lines, you can lead your viewer’s eye to it.
Why are Leading Lines Important?
Leading lines draw your eye to the point of interest and keep it from wandering. Used effectively, leading lines grab your viewer’s attention. The viewer’s eye will follow a visual path that points to something important in your image. It’s like taking a journey in a photograph to reach a certain point.
Leading lines guide the viewer’s eye through the frame and can add depth to your photos. Using leading lines
In most cultures, people learn to read left to right, top to bottom. This is the way our eyes naturally view a photograph. If you see a photo with strong leading lines, you’ll stare at that image a lot longer, you’ll view it differently, and you’ll feel different.
Use lines to create a sense of stability in an image. Lines often help make the structure of photo composition a lot stronger. Leading lines are not only used to draw the viewer’s attention to the main subject. Used well, they also provide a sense of vitality to images. This is mostly when straight lines are used in compositions to draw a viewer towards the focal point of a picture.
Each time you find a leading line to use in your photo, compose it carefully with your camera. Interesting use of any one of the photography composition rules is not subject to what anyone thinks is the right or wrong way to apply it.
Be creative in how you use leading lines. Think about how a line leads a viewer’s eye through your picture. Does it help draw a subject in the background towards the foreground? Will it help your subject stand out in the frame? There are many clichéd examples of how leading lines are to be used. But you can always use lines to make more creative and interesting photographs.
Elements Used in Photography Composition
There are several elements available to photographers when composing a photograph. Leading lines are only one of them. The use of one or more of these elements can dramatically change the look and feel of a photograph. Even though there are so-called rules of composition, they are better viewed as guidelines to help improve your photos. In any image, photographers can use two or more elements to create a compelling image.
Combining various
- Rule of Thirds
- Framing
- Perspective
- Pattern
- Symmetry
Never try to force the use of a particular composition rule or technique for its sake. If you want to take a picture that does not lend itself to being framed using the rule of thirds, don’t use it.
Some photographers will encourage you to learn the rules of composition and then break them because rules are made to be broken. I think a better approach is to learn the rules so well that you can apply them without having to consciously think about them. You will see a scene and instinctively know if it contains good leading lines or any other elements that will combine to make strong images.
Leaning towards your intuition to use leading lines or any other technique well takes focus and practice. Take time to study good examples of how lines are used well in photos. Then get out with your camera and practice. Go out to find interesting places where you can frame a scene with lines leading a viewer to look straight at what you want them to.
Look for paths with people walking on them. Fence lines or railings that lead straight to an interesting subject. Aim to take a viewer from one point in your photo to another. Frame each scene, so there’s a natural attraction that leads the viewer right where you want them to look. Concentrate on practicing using this technique with your camera. Create strong leading line images until you are confident with them.
Types of Leading Lines
Leading lines are in different forms and can be found almost anywhere in nature or everyday settings. Lines can be natural, like a stream, or unnatural like a bridge. There are five primary types of lines that you can use in leading lines
How you compose them within your frame determines whether or not they become leading lines in your shot. Any of them have an impact on a photo. However, there are aspects of how you manage your compositions that determine how effective they are as leading lines or if they are leading nowhere at all.
1. Vertical Lines
These lines suggest power, dominance, and growth. Examples include tall structural designs and trees. Vertical lines cannot begin at the corner of your image. As an alternative, keep the rule of thirds in mind to prevent your image from looking like it has been cut in half. Vertical lines should be kept as vertical as possible.
2. Horizontal Lines
Horizontal lines suggest peace, calmness, stability, and a sense of restfulness. The ocean, beaches, and fallen trees are some examples of horizon lines. They can strengthen the composition of the image and should be kept as horizontal as possible.
3. Diagonal Lines
Diagonal lines suggest action and can add depth to a shot. They are somewhat unbalanced and can help draw the eye to the photo. The best way to use diagonal lines is to present them from the bottom corner of the image to the opposite top corner. This is because it’s natural for our eyes to scan from left to right.
4. Curved Lines / S Curves Lines
Suggests elegance, sensuality, and a sense of balance. They don’t need to be S-shaped. Any form of a winding line can be used — for example, rivers, streams, roads, paths, or the human body.
5. Converging Lines
Converging lines add flow or depth to your image. They also add a sense of distance or scale: stairways, power lines, and railroad tracks. Our eyes are drawn to where intersecting lines connect. To create a stronger impact on visual interest, it’s best to position your subject near converging lines. Sometimes converging lines can be a point of interest in themselves free of the need for additional subjects in the shot.
How to Find Leading Lines?
Lines in photography are not always leading lines. Any photo can contain a curved line or a straight line that does not lead anywhere. How you position your camera, the lens you choose, and other things you do will create a leading line in a scene. Leading lines in
Leading lines can be almost everywhere you look, from a fence to the ocean shore, a building, or trees. Sometimes lines are not obvious and may even be implied. A good start is to examine professional photos and pay close attention to lines and other composition elements.
As you start to compose your next image, survey the area around your subject. Look for potential leading lines in the road, buildings, walls, waterways, and any other element that creates a line.
Lines leading to a subject do so because of how you include them in your composition. There must be some relationship between the line and your subject. If you photograph a line that does not somehow guide the viewer to your subject, it is not a leading line, so I recommend trying different angles and perspectives.
How you position your camera to take the photo in relation to the line and subject determines how effective the leading line is. You don’t always have to make a line intersect your subject. But the eye of the viewer needs to be drawn along the path of the line to what you are taking a picture of.
Is Your Eye Naturally Drawn Along?
Often, leading lines will begin in the foreground and lead the viewer’s gaze to something in the distance. A classic example of this is a country road leading off to distant mountains in the background.
When using a wide-angle lens, positing it close to the line you want to use will create a natural point of focus. This can lead a viewer’s attention from the foreground to the background where your subject is. It can also lead across the image from one side to the other. Where your subject is in relation to the line determines how effective it is as a leading line.
If what you are photographing is far from the line, the line will not lead the viewer to look at it. There must be some direct or implied path created by the line or lines leading where you want a viewer to look. This has a lot to do with where you place your camera and the lens you use.
We see the world in three dimensions.
Conclusion
Using leading lines in photography composition is a great way to get your viewers’ attention and tell a story with your shots. Placing lines at the right spot in your image can significantly influence the way people view it and will guide them through the scene.
I hope these
Practice Exercise
The aim of this exercise is to help you see how using leading lines can help draw attention to your main subject. If you have a subject, like a person, that you can move around, it will be helpful for this exercise, but not necessary.
- Find a place where you have some strong lines to work with.
- Attach a medium lens to your camera.
- Set your camera to Manual Mode or Aperture Priority Mode.
- Use Single Point Auto Focus or Single Servo Focus Mode to ensure precise focus on your subject.
- If you do have a subject that you can position along the lines, place them near the lines.
- Begin to experiment with compositions using the lines. As you do, also keep in mind the other aspects of composition you have learned in this article.
- Position yourself so the line leads where you want it and take your shot. Then do it again with as many shots as you can until you are very familiar with how this composition technique works. The more you free up your mind to see leading lines, the more natural it will become to include them when you take your next shot.
- Make a series of compositions: somewhere, your subject is at the end of the lines, near the edge of your frame, and somewhere, the subject breaks the flow of the lines in the middle of your frame.
- Use different focal length lenses to take some of your photos.
- Remember to take notes of what you are doing and why you are making the choices you are.
Compare your photos and choose some of the best ones to put in your photo gallery.
Very nice presentation for leading lines in composition. Informative and succinct. Thank you.
Really informative article on leading lines! Explains the difference between “Lines” and “Leading lines” ( something I’ve had trouble with for quite a while!) very well – I think I understand it at last, thank you!