Working With Lines: Diagonals
Today’s photo tip is about enhancing the looks of your photographs by using dominant lines in the image - in this case diagonal lines.
On the left here you can see an example of a picture with dominant diagonal lines - an exposed rock face with deep cracks.
Compositions with dominant diagonals tend to feel more dynamic than images with predominantly horizontals and/or verticals. The latter tend to feel more stable and calm - more about that in another article.
Since we live in a culture where we are used to scanning a page from left to right, an image like the one here seems especially effective in pulling us into the scene. Here, the very pronounced diagonal cracks in the rock face draws our attention from the lower left foreground, and up toward the climber in the upper right. If the orientation of the image had been reversed, such that the cracks had been oriented from upper left to lower right, this effect would have been weaker.
Another example of a diagonal composition: a fashion model wearing a bridal dress. Here there are diagonals in two dominant directions across the image; one strong imaginary line from upper left to lower right and a second from lower left to top center. (Note that I “read” the image from left to right!)
Such a composition, with diagonals criscrossing the image, is percieved as even more dynamic and intense than if the lines only go in one direction, as in the rock face image.
You could take this even further and make pictures with diagonals in various angles, all over the place - if you want to create a sense of tremendous busyness and even chaos.
In many cases you can take advantage of man-made diagonal patterns on various surfaces, such as marble or tile floors, to create interesting pictures where you put the subject of interest against such a striped backdrop.
Something you may want to avoid is making the diagonal lines run exactly from corner to corner in the image, especially if the lines are very strong. This sort of cuts the image in pieces, in a crude way.
So… practise finding diagonals everywhere - use them in your pictures in various ways, really feel the effects of diagonal lines, like the differences between diagonals in one dominant direction as opposed to criscrossing diagonal lines in several directions! Also notice the difference in how it feels if the diagonals are going from lower left to upper right as compared to the opposite - upper left to lower right.
You may even feel that in the latter case the diagonal seems to be coming out toward you, as I personally feel in the fashion shot above. Notice the line from the girl’s face down to her hand - is it going toward you or away from you? Actually, the hand is a bit further away from the camera than the face but yet it seems to be coming toward you - at least it feels that way to me.
