This post is a response to Cee’s Compose Yourself Challenge Week 5: Leading Lines.

I am just back from a trip where I was planning to do so many things that I couldn’t manage. One was to keep up with Cee’s Compose Yourself series. This is probably late, I can’t seem to get my dates straight.

I am using this week’s  essay and prompt to look at pictures I took while away instead of trying to take new ones. To try and see the pictures with new eyes.

The above three pictures all have straight leading lines. When I took the pictures part of what I was trying to show was a sense of how big distances were. I think that is why the lines wound up dominating the pictures.

Here are two pictures taken of the same archway, with the leading lines of the wall on the edge of the steps at two different angles. Picture 1, before and after editing:

I cropped it slightly and removed the bit of my son’s head since it seemed a distraction. With his head gone the horizontal line of the wall leads your eye to the stairway.

Picture 2: I left James in since he seemed to be a leading line:

Curving Lines:

The bent lines of the dead tree draw you into the living one planted in its core:

While this picture is pretty dark, experiments I did with compositions led me to prefer this one, which has a road curving toward the temple gate just slightly visible because it reflected the  lights shining on the gate.

in this picture the curved edge of the koi pond leads your eye to the boy and his grandfather.