 Did you know that your brain has a part, like an entire center, set up just for recognizing straight lines? This is something I just learned the other day and I was really fascinated by this. And this is something that we photographers can use to our advantage. Here is a photograph that I took of my friend Caitlin a while back. We were in Brussels on a trip and we were just traveling around in the bus and I saw behind her these streets whooshing by and I saw them her head lining up with the focus point or the vanishing point, that's what they call it in art, of the street and I thought, hmm, there's a photograph there. And although this isn't the most amazing photograph, you'll see that she's a little underexposed, I thought, you know, this is just kind of an interesting portrait. It's an interesting way of taking a picture of someone and it's a good illustration of what we call leading lines. Now leading lines just means that there are lines leading from one point of your composition to another. And in this case, all the lines are leading straight to Caitlin's shining, beautiful face. And in other cases, you might have your lines leading to other things and they might be leading in totally different directions and not all centered around one focal point, which is her face right here. This is called a focal point when everything is leading into one direction that they don't necessarily always need to be leading to a focal point, but sometimes they can. So in this situation, they will. I'll show you some other examples here in just a second. But leading lines, and that is with an S right there, are really important part of setting the emphasis of your image, which is really one of the big things in composition. We've talked about it in a lot of the other lessons and is no different here. Here is an example of basically the same photograph taken two times with two different sets of leading lines as sort of the compositional backbone of the image. Now these again are not really groundbreaking images, but they're just photos of my friend Jay's banjo here. This is a banjo, I'll write banjo on there. And the banjo was just sitting on my bed. We were recording some music in my apartment and I thought, hmm, the light's kind of nice on that. I should take a picture of it. And when I was taking a look at it, I tried two different things. And completely out of instinct, I took these two photographs. And if you look at this one to the left here, you can see that the lines are all kind of here in the middle. They're all leading to this focal point, maybe right here about or maybe right here. And in this one to the right, you can see that there are two totally different sets of focal leading lines. So you've got one here in the back. You've got another one in the front. And actually, that kind of counts as one because they're sort of the horizontal elements. And then you've got these sort of vertical elements here, these lines, these strings on the instrument. And they set up a very different feeling. So when you look at these two images, and I'll kind of delete some of as many of the lines as I can here, I got them all away. You can see that they're two very different images in a way because here, the emphasis I think is really here. And for some reason here, the emphasis is just a little bit in front of that. And it's not just the focus that does that. It's also a little bit the way that the image is built. So that is just one example of two different situations or two different photos of the exact same situation and how leading lines can be a little bit different in those two situations. Now here is an example of a very subtle use of leading lines. And this is just a friend of mine making ravioli. This is a little bit of sort of dough that's being turned into a ravioli. And she's got a little cutter here that's kind of making its way around this around this cup or this little bowl here. And she's got her fingers on top of it. She's holding it down and her fingers are sort of leading off sort of in this direction right here. And again, not the most revolutionary image. There's not really anything too exciting about this image. But just the shape is a little bit interesting and it's something that you can think about in your own images by creating a focus point which is right here and unfortunately in black and white this doesn't come across as well as in color. I should go find a color version for you. It just kind of gives it a sort of a feeling of closure. Now again, not an amazing photograph but leading lines can make what is essentially a boring photograph a little bit more interesting. Now here is use of leading lines to sell story especially here on the left. This is my friend Rebecca. We've seen pictures of her and some of the other lessons. And we were on a hike in Saxony again here in Germany. And this is just a photograph I held the camera up as high as I could while walking and trying not to drop the camera. And I just wanted to use the line of the road to kind of give the story, give the photo sort of the feeling of a hiking trip. I wanted to say, okay, we're going down this really long road here and she's hiking. I wanted to make sure that she was in the middle. I want to make sure that her head was clear of any debris and I didn't want it to collide with this right here. So for example, I didn't want Rebecca's head to be maybe right here. I wanted it to be a little lower than that. So I moved her up by much or moved her closer by lifting my camera up and sort of tilting it a little bit down so you can see my horizon is here on the top third. And I just centered her to kind of create a feeling of focus. But it's not anything that you don't see in any other places. But it's a photograph that tells the story of the day and is a nice photograph. So it's a way that you can think about telling stories about movement or by trying to show that movement through space in your photographs. Now this photo to the right here is basically taken on the same day and just a different photo of something that we saw along the way. It was this little garden they had just planted. It was springtime in Germany and they were planting their gardens. And I had kind of saw this and I thought, hmm, that is Germany. That really kind of explains to me what it's like to walk around in the country here. So how can I capture that? Well, I really liked these lines. You can see how these lines kind of make a really cool sort of shape like there. And then you can see how these lines make sort of the mirror image of that. Now you can kind of see, okay, that's interesting. And then I got kind of above the top third here. I've got another line that I put in. But really what's interesting about this image too is the way that the lines collide. So they collide obviously at that one point there. But they also kind of go off into different directions. So one thing is when I look at an image like this, I see this arrow and it kind of takes my eye and shoots it off the page for some reason. Like over there. And I see this line over here and it shoots me off in this direction. And then I see this one kind of throws my eye up to the top. So that's another thing. You want to think about where your lines are heading to because that's where your eyes are going to go. In some ways, I guess I kind of feel like when I see these lines here, it kind of throws my eye up here. And then I hit this green and I kind of like wander around. I come back down and then this one kind of throws my eye over here. So there's a lot of different things happening when your eye is reading a photo. It's darting around and trying to find the message in the image. And when it's doing that, it does lots of great things. And lines are a great way for you as a photographer to decide where that eye is going to go. So pay attention to when you're looking through your lens. Where are the lines leading? And why is that important? And is there something that you can do a little differently to make it more interesting? All right. So that was your lesson about leading lines. I hope that you enjoyed it and it helped you out. We're going to be doing more lessons about angles and things like that in future lessons here at adversity.org.