Photo Tip: the Old Rule of Thirds
When trying to give you, the reader, something useful and simple, I guess a good point to start is giving you some photo tips about composition. Putting all technical stuff aside for now, just put your attention on how you see the object you’re trying to capture in the viewfinder of your camera.
The idea is that you can make your pictures so much more interesting if you focus your conscious awareness on how you “frame” whatever-it-is-you’re-trying-to-capture before pushing the camera trigger.
There are many aspects to this, for now let’s introduce the first rule in the book:
§ 1: Rule of Thirds!
Imagine you divide the scene you see through the camera’s viewfinder into three parts, both vertically and horizontally, like this:
- it is really much easier to show than to explain in words.
Note that the intersection of two lines falls right near the middle of the woman’s face! And feel the tension and sense of movement created by all that mysterious black space to the left!
The idea behind this old rule is that a picture usually becomes more interesting if the major, dominating, elements are a bit off center.
The Rule of Thirds is a simple tool to help you avoid the boring habit of putting everything smack in the middle of every picture. Instead, keep imagining those lines, running as shown above, and try to place your object of interest somewhere along those lines.
This will introduce a sense of movement to your pictures. Imagine a picture of a person for instance. Put her right in the middle - what do you feel when you see that? Is she going anywhere? No, it seems she has already arrived! Ho-hum… But put her off center, at either of the vertical lines. Then what? Well, she may be on her way into the picture, or disappearing out of it (depending on which way she is positioning her body).
Every time you are about to snap a picture, ask yourself: “How can I use the Rule of Thirds to make this picture more interesting, with more of a sense of movement?” Keep doing that and I’m sure your photographic skill will improve visibly.
Here is another example:
- The picture has been digitally mastered in Photoshop to emphasize the massiveness of the rocks.
Take for instance the horizon in the picture above: it so happens that it is exactly two thirds of the way up! I didn’t plan it that way, I guess I did it by instinct.
If I had put the horizon exactly halfway up, dividing the picture into two equal-sized halves, the result had been felt as more static; less dynamic.
Note also that I’ve placed the largest rock formation slightly off center, a bit toward the left. (In this case, putting a massive dark form very much off center, with nothing but the light-colored sky and water surface in the rest of the image, could have created an “off-balance” feeling. Like every rule, the Rule of Thirds needs to be used with common sense.)
