Freelance Photographer
Seeing things differently
A taker of Photographs - A creator of images

Rule of thirds...

Like most of the so called 'Rules' in photography the 'rule of thirds' is merely a guide line so photographers and artists can grasp the basic knowledge of what works and what doesn't work in the composition stakes... The easiest way to do this is to divide your image in to nine equal sized squares by drawing a line 1/3 of the way in and another 2/3 of the way in, both verically and horizontally... This would of course make a mess of the image so if you use Photoshop there is an easy way of doing this...

 

• Click on Edit...
• Select Preferences...
• Click on Guides, Grids & Slices....
• This will bring you to a new window like the one on the left...

As you would expext you can make adjustments to the Guides, Grids and Slices but for the rule of thirds we will concentrate on the Grid section...

• You can define the colour of your grid lines via the color box indicated by the red cuffed pointer...

• From the style box select Lines as indicated by the blue cuffed pointer...

• Set the guideline every to 33.33 as indicated by the green cuffed pointer...

• Set the box indicated by the yellow cuffed pointer to percent...

• Set the subdivisions to 1 as indicated by the black cuffed pointer...

• Click on OK...

This will set the grid so that when you bring it up in Photoshop by pressing the Ctrl+' (control plus apostrophe) keys together it will overlay the grid on your image... This will not print and does not become a layer, it is merely a guide to composition... To remove it, just press the Ctrl+' combination again...

Now that we have the grid set up, lets see how it can help the composition of the image... Left, and below left you will see two sets of images showing each image before cropping and after cropping... These images were deliberately taken for this tutorial to allow cropping, though It is always best to compose correctly in camera where possible..

The top image of each pair are composed as someone with little knowledge of the rule of thirds would compose them, that is with the subject dead centre...

When the glove or any inanimate object is moved to one of the third lines it becomes more powerfull in the image and commands the attention...

The glove is actually placed on a junction of two of these lines... This is called the golden mean and is supposed to be the most powerful place in an image to have your main subject...

Now lets take the busker on the left... He is also positioned smack bang in the middle of the frame...

With the busker moved to a third line, as with any living or moving thing, it gives them room to move or look in to which avoids them looking confined...

This type of composition also eliminates unwanted (negative) space behind them as we all want to know where they are going, or what they are looking at, and not where they have been...



Anyway, the images are there for you to see for yourself and as photography, like any art form, is subjective, I will leave the decision to you on which looks better, smack bang in the middle or on a thirds line...