Exploring Lines and Flats

Project 2: Ex 1.3: line

One challenge for me during this current Covid-19 crisis is that my photographic subject material may be a bit limited.  Living in a rural location and having to avoid unnecessary social contact leaves me with a plethora of fields and countryside scenes and very little else.  This I will take as an opportunity to be creative with what I see and how I shoot it.

My daily walk (for allowed exercise) took me across the fields, through a small spiny and out again to more fields.

I took a number of photographs using lines to create a sense of depth.  The ones that I felt turned out the best are below.

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Line 1 – footbridge, the alternating diagonals keep you interested in the picture leading your eye on way and then another.  In Line 1 and Line 2 the vertical lines coming up from the bottom of the frame anchor the photograph.

The perspective lines in Line 2- footbridge, line 5 – tractor track and line 6 – across the valley do draw the eye in quickly as suggested in EYV coursebook but because there is an end stop in each, I don’t feel it is uncomfortable. There were very obvious horizontal lines in 6 which I liked, they made the view a peaceful calming one and slowed down the eye.

The two below didn’t feel quite so successful to me:

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I used the rusty pole as the strong vertical in the image, placing it close to the implied diagonal line created by the upright posts together with the trees. There is also an implied diagonal line in the rapeseed which otherwise uses focus to create a sense of depth.

Flattening an image

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There is no sense of scale in flat images and no sense of perspective.  It’s not easy to see how far away the camera was when the photograph was taken. The camera was about 6ft above the stream but only about 2ft above the mud and it would be difficult to tell that. 

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Since it was okay to be abstract with the flat images and I was bored with fields, I had a go at using glass items. It was very tricky to get an accurate focus;auto-focus was hopeless.   I liked using the grain of the wood, perhaps I could have taken it at an angle to make a diagonal rather than horizontal line.

The EYV course book (p25) refers to ‘another rule of photography’ that ‘leading lines should lead somewhere within the frame’ and warns that diagonal lines can lead the eye ‘straight out of the frame’.  The photographic example of flattening by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (EYV. P25) seems to contradict this as both the jetties and the boats form diagonal lines, perhaps the boats acting as points might be the reason the eye doesn’t hurry off the page.

In my photographs, the lines start at the edge of the frame and travel into it.  There is an exception; in the examples of flattened images, the blue pipe crosses the frame entirely and this encourages a more transient look at the image.