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LEADING THE EYE – Part One

One of the basic jobs of composition is to try and influence HOW people look at your image. Do they start in one part of the frame and then move over somewhere else, or does their eye just wander aimlessly, or just stare? It’s not always easy to have much influence, but it’s possible, and the more control you have over the way a viewer takes in your photograph, the more interesting the games you can play with composing. Essentially, it means persuading the viewer to experience the image in a particular order, seeing one thing first, then moving on to another.

One reason why this isn’t all that common in photography — less so than in painting, for example — is that it’s a deliberate process, and most photography happens too fast to allow that much room. Also, most photographers prefer simply to react to the scene in front of them. Of course, like many shooting techniques, not having much time doesn’t prohibit it, and highlights the skill and experience you need to handle it quickly. It’s nevertheless easier to lead the eye in some types of photography than in others. Landscape, architecture and studio photography, for example, all usually allow much more time to think and compose. Certainly more than reportage and street shooting. Another reason why controlling the viewer’s eye isn’t widely attempted is that it’s a very uncertain process. There’s no way of forcing anyone to look at an image in a particular way, short of presenting it on-screen as a pan-and-zoom video.

Even so, whatever the difficulties, it’s an undeniably useful set of techniques. Leading the eye from one part of the frame to another does two things. First, it draw’s attention to one particular subject, and if you do that successfully, you can keep that subject quite small in the frame. Second, it creates movement across the frame, and that inevitably helps to make the view coherent. When you can make it work it adds a new level of interest, and even complexity, to a photograph. And because the idea of leading the eye involves some kind of sequence — starting here then ending there — it even brings the extra dimension of time to a still image.

But before anything else, it helps to know what draws attention in an image. What kinds of subject, where they’re placed, how the light falls, the lines move, and the focus….

Visual weight

Almost too obvious to say is that we look most at what interests us. This means that when we start to look at anything, be it a real scene or an image, we bring our expectations and an unconscious list of what we think is important. Certain subjects tend to attract more than others, either because we’ve learned to expect more information from them or because they appeal to our emotions or desires. The most common high-attractant subjects are the human face, and within it, the eyes and mouth, because this is where we get most of our information from for deciding how someone will react. It means that, size for size in the frame, a human face will usually pull the eye more strongly. And that means that you can compose a shot with a face small in the frame, and also way off-centre, and still be confident that the viewer’s eye will end up there. As happens here in a shot of a young woman on a bench, just turning to look. Her face actually occupies a tiny part of the frame (less than half a percent), and yet it’s where the eye goes unfailingly)

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In the same way, a human figure attracts more attention than do most objects in a scene, and so you can use it small int he frame without losing it from the attention. Also, because in this kind of shot the small figure is usually a counterpoint to the landscape or setting, the balance between the two tends to be more effective if the figure is away from the centre. That encourages the eye to travel across the frame. In fact, figures in a landscape make up a genre of photography in their own right — one that I’ll explore in an article appearing here soon.

Another class of subject that attracts the eye with a high weighting is writing — again, it obviously has high information value. Words and numbers. In street photography, for example, signs and billboards have a tendency to divert attention, and the meaning of the words can add another level of interest. The problem often is that it can take AWAY attention from actions and events that you would rather the viewer pays attention to. And it doesn’t matter much if the language is understood or not. Even if it’s unintelligible, it still attracts the eye. You can use this to add interest to an image, so that the letters or characters become a forceful element in the composition, as in the shot below….

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And here’s a case where the two are combined, deliberately — face and lettering. In this photograph of a holding tent at a Red Cross hospital for combat injuries in the Sudan civil war, I wanted to show two things more or less equally. One was the injured soldier, an amputee, and the other was the rich history of graffiti that had accumulated over time. This graffiti contained one obvious slogan that removes the need for a caption, and drawings of animals, in particular cattle (many of the patients had been from cattle-rearing ethnic groups).

Generally, the way people look at this picture goes something like the following…..

The ICRC (Red Cross) hospital at Lopiding, part of the international relief complex centered at Lokichokio in northwest Kenya. The 500-bed hospital has treated the wounded from both rebel and government sides, as well as civilians.  Loss of limbs is common among soldiers brought here for treament, and prosthetics are designed, manufactured and fitted here. Depicted: Surgery on a child in one of the hospital’s operating theatres.
The ICRC (Red Cross) hospital at Lopiding, part of the international relief complex centered at Lokichokio in northwest Kenya. The 500-bed hospital has treated the wounded from both rebel and government sides, as well as civilians. Loss of limbs is common among soldiers brought here for treament, and prosthetics are designed, manufactured and fitted here. Depicted: Surgery on a child in one of the hospital’s operating theatres.

First the face, then up to the lettering and read the sentence, then around other key points like the drawings and the crutch, repeatedly returning to the face. And here it is as a short video (but still much slower than the way the eyes would take it in)…

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So, on to the practical ways of drawing attention. The most straightforward and usable technique for influencing the viewer’s eye is ‘pointing’, which means using graphic elements in an image to take the eye toward something that might not otherwise first grab the attention. Naturally, there are conditions, but when you can recognise them in a situation, you have the opportunity to exploit them — if you want. Lines, the play of light, perspective and focus can all have a strong effect, as the examples here and in the second part of the article next month show.

Lines

Lines are the most obvious way, whether as obvious, hard edges or as implied lines, which include the invisible eye-lines that point from someone in the image looking at something. Lines ‘point’ because we see them as having a direction and they encourage the eye to travel along them. By nature, the eye and brain are always trying to find simple graphic structures in what we look at, ‘joining the dots’. If you’re into Gestalt, the rules of grouping explain much of this, in particular the law of Good Continuation, which says that the eye wants to link different visual elements so as to make a smooth contour, like a straight or curving line, regardless of what these elements actually are in the real world. A tree, a house, a person can together make a line in the mind’s eye from a certain viewpoint. This is an implied line, and can ‘point’ just as surely towards something in the frame as can an obvious edge line.

The angle of the line plays an important rôle. In terms of energy, noticeability and sense of movement, the strongest is the diagonal, So, for instance, a definite diagonal with one end close to a corner and the other near the centre will almost always help to take the eye inward. Here’s a strong and definite example….

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As shown in the diagram, there is just one significant diagonal line in this shot – the railing – yet the photograph is full of ‘diagonality’. What makes this happen is the perceived movement, the mass of commuters all marching in the same direction across London Bridge. This is reinforced by the lorry and cyclist travelling in the opposite direction, which act as a counterpoint. The shot was composed and timed for just this opposition.

Curves have entirely different qualities, both graphically and expressively. As a line, the unique feature of a curve is that it contains a progressive change of direction, and this gives it a sense of rhythm which straight lines lack. The impression of movement along it, even acceleration, is also greater. Curved movement like this is smooth and flowing, which easily carries the eye along. Here’s an example, two women on a walkway of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The subject began as the building, but the contrast of tradition (the women’s dress) against the almost futuristic architecture was hard to resist, and I changed my attention to this. The architecture had to dominate as much as possible, but the question was, how far could the contrast of scale be pushed without losing the women from attention? In other words, I wanted the attention to be taken first by the building and only then settle on the women. Closing in with the zoom would lose this slight surprise. The solution was to make use of the lines of the architecture to guide the eye, using a wide angle (20mm). The large curved mass at left dominates at first glance. Then the repeated curved lines lead the eye along them inwards and down, where they meet the low baseline of the walkway. Positioning the figures at the base of the thin white vertical reinforces this.

Muslim women on a lower balcony of the Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Built in 1998 by architect Cesar Pelli, this twin-towered skyscraper was, at 1483 feet (452m) tall, the tallest building in the world at the date of its completion, measured to the highest point.
Muslim women on a lower balcony of the Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Built in 1998 by architect Cesar Pelli, this twin-towered skyscraper was, at 1483 feet (452m) tall, the tallest building in the world at the date of its completion, measured to the highest point.

Inward & outward

The rectangular frame of a photograph automatically invites the viewer to look INTO it, so there’s a natural tendency for the eye to move inward, irrespective of anything else going on with the image. As we saw in Part 1 earlier, diagonals do a very good job of leading the eye inward, and If there are other diagonals leading to the centre from other parts of the frame, they reinforce this. This is exactly what happens with a wide-angle lens and straight-edged subjects like buildings — in other words, strong linear perspective. In normal eye-level views, horizontal lines that run away form the eye converge in a photograph; this is the normal effect of perspective. By converging, they become diagonals, or at least most of them do, and you can manipulate the sense of depth in an image by using these lines for linear perspective. Here below, linear perspective AND lines are exaggerated by a wide-angle lens (the equivalent of 21mm) and lead the eye fairly directly towards the building in the distance. Note that the slightly shallower pitch of the roof at the end of the barn, and the lower part of the tree work to ‘bend’ the linear perspective slightly. In the process of convergence, all or most of the lines become diagonal, and this induces visual tension and a sense of movement. The movement itself adds to the perception of depth, along lines that carry the eye into and out of the scene.

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Those were obvious, ‘real’ lines, but implied lines can do the same. In this shot below, eye-lines (which I’ll show more of in Part 2) and perspective combine to reinforce each other. The place is Siena during the annual Palio celebrations. An assumed eye-line from the foreground figure, added to by the rather less obvious two figures in the middle distance, combines with an obviously strong geometrical perspective (because of an ultra-wide angle lens used from close) to focus attention firmly on the airborne flag.

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All of these shots have been taking the eye inward more strongly than it otherwise would, but with some effort and technique, you can pull the eye outward, and because this goes against a natural way of looking at an image, it can be simply more interesting, adding dynamic tension. Sorting and tramping down freshly picked cotton south of Khartoum, two Sudanese women move deftly and gracefully. A wide-angle lens exaggerates the geometry of the image close to the edges of the frame, and from a sequence of shots the one chosen here has the most energy and movement — the lines and gestures pull the attention outwards both left and right.

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Here’s another case where it seems more interesting, and relevant, to lead the eye outward — towards the right. The location is a southern Indian temple, by the name of Venupopelaswamy, and this was early on the day of a religious festival. Much more happened later, but before the crowds arrived, this woman and her daughter came for a puja. The point of the picture is the sacredness of the water, and for me the best moment for conveying this was when the woman held her hands cupped with water over the artificial lake. All the other elements, including the branches of the tree were facing right, so that became the natural dynamic.

Indian woman praying with daughter at Venupopaleswamy temple, Mysore, India.
Indian woman praying with daughter at Venupopaleswamy temple, Mysore, India.
Michael FreemanOther articles by author

In a 40 year career, internationally renowned photographer and author Michael Freeman has focused on documentary travel reportage, and has been published in all major publications worldwide, including Time-Life, GEO and a 30-year relationship with the Smithsonian magazine. He is also the world’s top author of photography books, drawing on his long experience.
In total, he has published 133 books, with 4 million copies sold, including 66 on the craft of photography, published in 27 languages. With an MA in Geography from Oxford University, Freeman went first into advertising before launching his career in editorial photography with a journey up the Amazon.

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