Composition Week: Lead Lines

For Wednesday of composition week, I want to take a few minutes to look at lead lines. What are lead lines? Well they’re lines that help someone looking at our image comprehend it, and see the things we want them to see. Let’s look at an example.

Here our lead lines are played by the rails. They guide the viewer’s eye from the left corner of the image up to the primary subject -- the locomotive. The lines don’t necessarily have to be distinct from the subject of the image. In fact, sometimes they can be the subject, as with the following picture.

The only hard rule is that you don’t want your lines to be confusing to the brain. For example, in the optical illusion below, the horizontal lines are all parallel, but the way that the white and black squares are placed causes our brains to see the lines slanted. This dissonance can be a useful thing in art, but generally we want to avoid it in photography to make it easier for our viewer to comprehend our image. Things that confuse the eye can cause motion sickness in some people.

Cafe Wall Illusion by Fibonacci (CC-SA 3.0/GFDL). From Wikimedia Commons

Like all of our previous entries, lead lines aren't necessarily something that you have to use in your images, but they can be helpful tools to keep in your bag of tricks. For the last two days of composition week we're going to look at two more equal-but-opposite techniques. Hope to see you then.