Stay Composed

When a photographer wants to draw your eye to a certain part of a photograph, he will use light sources, cropping, and props, but also experiment with lines and composition. A line does not necessarily have to be obvious, or drawn with a ruler, it can be created by lining things up in a path that subtly guides your eye. There are different kinds of lines: horizontal, vertical, diagonal and curved. All of these are used by artists to get a desired effect, for example a diagonal line gives the sense of movement or depth.

As a photographer, Karsh made many decisions before taking a photograph. One of these decisions was how the image would be composed. The composition of an artwork is the way in which visual elements are arranged or put together so as to create a shape or relationship to each other. A common shape used in art is the triangle, which artists have used throughout the history of art. For example, Renaissance artists would use the triangle to represent hierarchy in paintings, always pointing to what the artists considered the most important – Heaven.