One of the things I love about photography is letting the viewer decide what the picture means to them. I try to avoid coming up with names or adding descriptions to pictures. When I take a photo something draws me to it but I may not see it until the editing process and I’ll use those tools to try and focus the eye on what I’m seeing and what I want the viewer to see. There’s several different ways to accomplish this.
The first method is to use light/shadows. In the example below the sign isn’t what I wanted the viewer to see first. I wanted the shadow to be the first thing the eye saw and because it’s a somewhat familiar shape it would register that it was from a sign and then the eye would move to the actual sign.
Another way to lead your viewer’s eye is by using lines. You can use them to direct to the focus of the picture or they can be the picture themselves. In the example below I wanted to emphasize the emptiness of the street and lead to the fog in the distance. In the second example the escalator lines are the entire picture.
The last method I’m going to discuss in this post is the rule of thirds. I’m not new to photography in general so this is something I’ve read and heard about for years. The rule of thirds simply says that by putting an object or person in the left or right third of a picture and leaving the other 2/3 open. In the example below I’m using the rule of thirds.
There are more ways to draw the user’s eye to a specific point in your picture. I’ll cover those in a later post.