Leading Lines
I’m going to be writing a couple of blogs about my photographic style. Often when I shoot either cosplay or non cosplay, I subconsciously use some photographic techniques to help tell a story. I will be talking about some of them in my blogs starting with leading lines. I use lines in a lot of photographs to help direct the eyes within an image. Some are visible lines and others are implied.
Here I feel there are two main lines within the image both leading upto the subject. They’re very subtle in the image but I feel they still help bringing you to the subject. The first line can be seen at the bottom right leading into the middle of the frame. I often use seating in a image as one of my leading lines. The second line is on the left, using the baseball bat and arms to go upto the face. The face looking the same direction i feel also empowers the lines in the same direction.
I’m going to briefly talk about using the eyes as a powerful tool to capture the audience. I will be going into more detail at a later point. Here the use of the extended arm in combination with the eyes helps the image flow from the face/body to the end point of the hands. Although there are no direct lines coming from the eyes, our brain knows there’s something important so focuses on that direction. You’re not looking at the top right or bottom right corner beacuse the eyes and arm are focusing you towards the left.
I’m going to be focusing more on the non-cosplay image here as an example of using a pathway to create leading lines. It’s not so much a pathway but more a lake. Because it’s one continuous colour and texture the same theory of leading lines also works. The lines in this case are the foliage on the left and right-hand side. Although the lines featured aren’t parallel, they still push you towards the subject and achieve the goal of leading the focus where I wanted. Whilst taking cosplay photos, I have wanted to achieve this result with leading lines, however, the effect has only been achieved with railings.
This is an example of using railings as part of a composition. Having the hand and on the railing also helps curve the line around up to the face area. The downside to this image is the contradicting lines on the left-hand side as well as below the main line being used. Those lines combined with the pathway force you past the subject to the background and an empty uninteresting mess.
As you can see from this image from the same area, the line is a lot more powerful as it ends at the subject. The hand on the railing also helps as the line continues up the arm, to the face.
I hope this gives a good insight into my use of leading lines within cosplay photography. It’s a powerful tool when used right and can become distracting if used incorrectly. This is one of my favourite tools to encourage flow within the image, which requires the correct environment over a pose. In the future weeks, I’ll be covering more ways to create flow within images, as you can’t always use leading lines.
Next week I will be talking about sub-framing, another technique I love to use, creating a frame and hard stop to the outside area of an image.
