This week our assignment was to consider our point of view in order to control your lines.  Leading lines are something photographers consider when taking photographs.  Leading lines 'lead' your eye to the subject in a photograph.  Changing your point of view as the photographer will change where those lines lead. Most of the time when I think about leading lines, I think about lines on the ground (roads, sidewalk lines, brick paths, etc) but I used a different tactic this week. I was recently taking photos of dogs in front of doors and many of the doors had a lot of detail and lines on them.  In looking back at the photos, my point of view certainly affected the images and how I feel about them.

This is Louie.  A dachshund from NJ that now lives in Barcelona.  This first image is edited and the second photo is the exact same image straight out of the camera.  You can see I removed his leash, I cropped the photo and I actually extended the door behind him.  I didn't care for the wall on the left side.  In the photo, the lines on the wall distracted me.  If I would've changed my point of view when I was taking the photo, I could've eliminated having the wall on the left in the photo at all.  Lucky for me, this type of editing is pretty easy to do.

For anyone on Instagram, Louie has his own page: Rocco_Louie.  He's famous!  Gotta love that!

In this next photo, there are all kinds of lines on the door that affect the image.  I have several of this pup Bimbo in front of this door.  (Bimbo is 6 months old.  Look at his HUGE paws!)  By changing my point of view, the photos change dramatically.  In the 2nd photo, I am not positioned directly in front of Bimbo so the perspective or point of view of the photo changes.  I definitely prefer being directly in front of my subject when there are a lot of leading lines in my images particularly when the lines are behind my subject.

I have also learned this about myself as a photographer: I rarely take a straight picture.  Luckily there are options in Lightroom and Photoshop to straighten them and those are tools I use frequently although the photo of Louie above was actually pretty straight!

Next up is Pet Love Photography, serving Greater Cincinnati and the San Francisco Bay Area.  I'm sure the other photographers will have very different examples of their leading lines.