Running throughout the month of October, Becky’s Lines&Squares challenge will make you realise that every photo you’ve ever taken has at least one line in it.
My submissions feature multiple sets of lines that are confusing if we allow the eye to trace them all, comparing and contrasting, particularly the picture of reflections in a city shop window. In each picture, we have to step back from exploring the lines to see the whole: an interesting exercise.
Susan Rushton 
Nice variety – fab here is the blue art glass- it almost looked like a glass water bottle with one of those blue plastic coverings – 😉
It’s a wonderfully bold blue too.
At the beginning of my botanical drawing classes, the instructor declared that our drawings would have no lines. Lines were forbidden! I was confounded — how does one draw without lines? And that is when the entire concept of The Line became engrossing to me. I love all these images and their expressions of Line.
Did you come to understand what your instructor meant? I suppose it would work with watercolour, up to a point.
Yes, I did: the appearance of a line was to be accomplished with infinitesimally fine shading. She said there were no lines in nature and therefore no lines in botanical drawing. It really did change my way of seeing. It also changed my back because of the hours hunched over the drawing board.
For better, for worse then. I find myself agreeing with HeyJude (below) that nature does have lines, but can see the benefit in labouring through art to persuade us it does not. And, as always, it depends on interpretation – nature does not have two dimensional ones, which is perhaps the point of her ‘lines’.
superb collection . . and you are right get too close to the lines and you lose all sense of where you are
One of the interesting things of a month-long challenge is that you are forced to think a bit more deeply around a subject.
That’s so true
I knew you could be relied upon to find lines and squares, even among your beloved plants!
Trust nature to provide!
As ever ….
Love the squares and lines in your hanging garden. Interesting comment of getting too close to the lines and I agree.
Lines are very demanding of our attention, it appears.
You are quite right that these challenges do make us think more about our photography. Lines are everywhere and I disagree with the art teacher who said there are no lines in nature. Has she never looked at a leaf? To my mind those veins are distinctly lines.
My instinct is to think nature does have lines, but she was making a point by being outrageous as it is not as easy to represent them as we might expect. I have no experience of botanical drawing unfortunately, but it is perhaps like the rules that say we should not end a sentence with a preposition or split an infinitive.
Oh, how I love that blue glass!
The blue glass is by Craig Mitchell Smith. We saw it at the Missouri Botanic Garden a couple of years ago.
Wowsah!
Really love that shot of the hanging garden 🙂 🙂
It reminds me of an underwater garden in some strange way.
Lovely set of photos. The hanging garden looks like a lovely place to sit and just enjoy life. I suspect those plumb bobs get touched by children (and adults) a lot.
I suspect you are right.
You did a nice job with abstractions in these images.
The nature photographer in me begs to differ with your statement that “every photo you’ve ever taken has at least one line in it”—assuming that by “line” you mean “straight line”. Your statement is often true for photographs that include human elements like those in this post’s four pictures. On the other hand, many nature photographs show no straight lines.
I was interpreting lines very loosely, including curved and wavy lines – I suppose anything with progression or outline. You are very much in tune with Oddment’s comment about her drawing instructor’s words (in the comments above).
“Line” used to mean what we would now call “curve”. People sometimes still use the word in the older sense, as you say you do. It was the ambiguity that led to the creation of the unambiguous term “straight line”, which mathematicians see as a redundancy because in the technical sense a line is necessarily straight.
It’s interesting how words change their meaning. I’d see a need for a modifying word – straight, curved, wavy, meandering – to define a particular type of line, but I am not a mathematician.