Lines: Dance and Movement

Lines have many uses in photography. They can give a photograph shape and structure, mood and movement. They can lead the eye into and around a picture, they can give a sense of shape, scale or depth. Today I'm going to discuss a few examples of my dance photography which employ lines for their effect - in this case movement.

  This is a picture from the English National Ballet. The dancers' arms create lines which, extended, create an isosceles triangle, pulling away from the centre.

A moment earlier or later, and the partial symmetry of the dancers would be lost as they separate; the picture would become 'looser' as they move away.

The foreground dancer's expression is not only visible, but also slightly towards the left and upwards, again reflecting the background dancer's gaze (to the right and downwards). Often we look for faces first - it is fortunate that the dominant dancer is the one we are drawn to.

The implied lines in this picture both create a triangle, which gives a 'pleasing' shape and adds directions and a movement to the dancers. 

  

This next picture is from the same shoot. There is much more going on here, but it's not too 'busy' since the dancers are in roughly similar poses. Again, the lines created by the arms are diagonal.

It is said that where horizontal lines give a sense of calmness and stability, diagonals create dynamism and movement.

 

This picture is from Tanguera. BBC Breakfast used one of my images from the shoot recently as the backdrop for an interview with the cast. This shot is similar to the first example here - lines pulling away from the centre. The woman's body and legs, too, are at an extreme angle, increasing the sense of movement.

In this case, I could have drawn two more lines from the dancers' faces to the bottom left. The direction of a gaze in a photograph creates a powerful implied line as we follow their line of sight. Here, as opposed to the ballet dancers earlier, they are looking in the same direction, suggesting harmony and unity in their dance. They appear synchronised and purposeful, more so because of their more dramatic expressions.

This dancer is running left to right.

Note that he has 'space to move into'. This would have felt restricted with a tighter crop - his wide, balancing arms and feet far apart create lines which suggest he's moving quickly.

This is from Cinderella. I used a slow shutter speed here which blurred the costumes as they twirl around. I love the mixture of swirling colours here.

Here, the direction created is therefore mainly rotational. Luckily for me, the central figure's face is still - one element of focus in an otherwise blurry scene. 

Usually, theatre lighting is poor. To the human eye it is bright enough - but we can compensate, fill in the gaps and see reasonably well in low-light. But to a camera it's really not as bright as it would seem.

As such, it can be hard to photograph movement on a stage without a degree of blur. Unless intended and used well, blur is often avoided in favour of something sharp and punchy - a moment caught in time.

One way to do this is to wait until there is a natural pause. Here, the dancer is at the peak of his jump, and so (relatively) quite still. An added bonus is his pose is therefore at it's peak - arms and legs all pointing, giving a complementary sense of movement.

Note also his expression further seems to 'raise' his jump a little higher still as he looks up, rather than downwards.