Patti is the host for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and she is challenging everyone to look at diagonal lines.

I am starting with these 3 photos as they no doubt feature diagonal lines.

I have been a self-taught hobby photographer from the very beginning. I photograph by intuition. If I like a scene, I’d go for it. I have never paid much attention to leading lines or any sort of lines but I’ll admit, there’s something about diagonal lines that draws me into an image.

All 3 photos were cropped in post-process and I can’t explain why the photos were cropped to the way they are like why the smoke from the plane begins at the bottom left corner. It’s all done in my subconscious, I guess. I just do whatever looks good.

For the first time since I started my photography journey, I enrolled myself in photography courses in early 2022. I wanted to see whether I could improve, hone my photography skills, and perhaps take it to the next level, if there is one.

The first class was on composition. That first night, the instructor presented slide after slide of different photography compositions. For a moment, I felt like I was suffering from an information overload. So many types of compositions! At the end of the night, the only new concept I could grasp was the concept of leading lines.

In the next class, we spent over an hour outside the classroom practicing photo compositions with this clock tower as our subject. I’m probably not the first to admit this but there are only so many ways to photograph a subject.

I went around and around, photographing at different distances and angles. This was my final photo before the sun went down, which turned out to the instructor’s favorite. I admit, it’s my favorite, too.

Finally, I spent quite a bit of time editing this image in Lightroom, mostly trying to figure out the cropping. After some experimenting, I decided to crop out the forest in the background and just focus on the prairie and that lone bison in the middle. I think it worked out pretty well as the lines seems to converge on the bison.