Tips: Rule of Thirds in Photography
One of the most common mistakes of photography is to place the subjects in the middle of the frame. A basic tip on composition that I found when starting photography is the “Rule of Thirds“.
Contrary to it’s name, the Rule of Thirds is not a hard rule that you need to apply to all your photographs. Rather, it is a guideline to compose your image to make it more visually stimulating. It started out as a guide for artists to compose their drawings and paintings.
So what exactly is this rule? Try to imagine a 2 vertical lines cutting across your image into 3 parts and 2 horizontal lines cutting across the same image into 3 parts. Or maybe stop imagining and take a look at the picture below:
Notice the red circles that are placed on the 4 intersection of the line. Place important elements of your composition where the red circles are. You can also make use of the lines to compose parts of your images in a third of the image either vertically or horizontally. For example, landscape shots will often benefit it you place the horizon along the 2 horizontal lines.
Let’s take a look at the following example:
Empty Eyes by Thomas Hawk
This is a great portrait of a gorilla by Thomas Hawk. The beauty of this photo is that it captures the emotions of the gorilla. This photo is also very nicely composed. Let’s put the Rule of Thirds on top of this image and take a closer look at it:
Notice anything about the photo? The left eye of the gorilla are positioned close to the upper right intersection of the Rule of Thirds. Also, the face of the gorilla takes up approximately 2/3s of the vertical thirds leaving the 1/3 empty. This leaves enough room to the gorilla to “stare” into making the photo very balanced and appealing.
As mentioned earlier, the Rule of Thirds is not meant to be a hard and unbreakable rule. It is intended as a guideline to compose more appealing images. We can see this in the gorilla example. The left eye of the gorilla does not have to be perfectly aligned with the intersection and neither is the face taking up 2 full vertical thirds.
There are also times when breaking the Rule of Thirds will result in an even better photograph. But as someone wiser than me once said, “To break a rule, you have to first know the rule.”
Try to think about the Rule of Thirds before composing your next photograph. Soon it will become a habit and become a natural process whenever you compose a photograph.
More information about the Rule of Thirds:
August 29th, 2007 at 6:47 am
[…] When composing photographs, try to keep it as simple as possible. By keeping a photograph simple, you will often create an effect of singling out the subject from its surroundings. Simplicity is one of the basic photography composition techniques along with “Rule of Thirds“. […]