Sports Photography Class: Use Lines to Your AdvantageUse lines on a field or those of a landscape to your advantage. You want the eye to move around the picture.

When you are composing your picture, use the lines and shapes in your background you are already given to your advantage. You want people who are looking at your pictures to have their eyes moving through the image. 

For the Pirates team on Opening Day,I knew where the players would line up in conjunction with the sign, stands, and city to make a good horizontal flow. Everything stretches from left to right including the main subjects in uniform.

For the exercising photo, I used extreme lines and waited for my subject to come into the frame. I found a clean background and raised my camera to clean it up even more and to exaggerate the horizontal lines on a playing field.