What does her eyes say?
William Shakespeare once said, “The eyes are the window to your soul”.
In both my online class with the BPSOP and my “Stretching your Frame of Mind” workshop I conduct around the planet, we work on the elements of visual design and composition. One of the most important elements if not the most important is LINE.
Briefly, a line is a mark made by a continuously moving point across a surface. There are horizontal, vertical, diagonal, round, curved, parallel, zigzag, and wavy lines…not to mention dotted lines and dashes. All these lines have the same thing in common: direction, length, and thickness.
All the above-mentioned lines are straightforward and easy to grasp, but what about ‘implied lines’? What about those lines that are more of an ambiguous nature? For example, all the edges around ‘Form’ are implied lines. A statue of Abraham Lincoln is Abraham Lincoln because his outLINE shows him to be. What about the ‘horizon’ line that people are always forgetting to straighten?
But that’s a whole other issue!!
There’s one more implied Line that most photographers usually don’t consider. It’s that line that runs from the subject’s eyes to the lens. To my way of thinking, it’s a very important line that connects the photographer to the subject, creating an intimate bond of sorts that also generates a kind of energy field.
Personally, I love that bond and the majority of photos I’ve shot in my career has, for the most part, had my subject looking directly into the camera.
The hard part about having the subject look into the lens is keeping his or her look fresh. It’s very much like asking the subject to smile. If you don’t shoot immediately, the smile starts to lose the freshness.
Since I’ve been shooting people for fifty years, I can tell you that the eyes can talk to you and can portray emotions and feelings as quick as one blink to another.
If you have clicked on the link and read the post that I sent on one click, one smile, you can adapt that thought process to this current post on having eye contact. Remember that the eyes are indeed, the windows to the soul.
Visit my website at: www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
