Rule of Thirds
Herein you will find the tedious ramblings of a troubled mind. Too often I run across people who have not heard of the rule of thirds. In an effort to cleanse the unwashed, here is some information.
Most of us have an inherent need for symmetry. We tend to put the subjects of our photos in the dead center. If the subject is a landscape, then we tend to put the horizon at the vertical center. Sometimes this works. More often the rule of thirds works better. Here's one example.
This picture has half land, half sky. It's not too terribly shabby, but the water is a bit boring. The sky, though, is quite interesting. Why not take the shot with 2/3 sky and 1/3 land?
Same place, same time, different framing, and much more interesting. But what if the sky is boring? See the next example.
Hmm, snazzy fall colours, but a fairly blah sky. We'll crop for 1/3 sky and 2/3 land.
Same shot with most of the sky cropped out allowing the fall colours to dominate.
This is only the very beginning of the rule of thirds. So far we have dealt with the frame divided vertically into three horizontal stripes. Now we will divide it horizontally into vertical stripes as well, so that there is a grid of two horizontal and two vertical lines. I will call upon Barney the Wonder Dog to illustrate:
That's Barney the Wonder Dog smack in the middle of the frame. I like this shot even though it defies the Rule of Thirds, and I'll explain why a bit later.
These lines connect at four points, and these points are the visual optimum points for a subject to appear, according to the Rule of Thirds..
And yes, I intentionally selected a picture in which I had broken the rule of thirds. 8-) Rules are meant to be broken! But you should know them. To this end we will look at two more shots:
Here is Barney the Wonder Dog crossing the forbidding tundra of our back field. He's kind of lost-looking in there, so it would be nice to crop in to blow him up a bit, especially since that white sky is so thoroughly unpleasant-looking. The question is where to crop him to. Using the rule of thirds we have four options for optimal placement. I know instantly which one I'm going to select, and you'll see it below:
Why here? Motion! Barney is looking and moving towards the lower left of the frame. It is optimal to give him room to move, in a visual sense. By cropping him to the upper right we show where he's going. Do you notice how in the first picture he seems to be to the left of center? If you take a ruler to your screen you will see that he is in the exact center of the frame, but your mind sees him 'moving' and that gives him a visual momentum that makes him appear to be farther 'ahead' than he really is. Weird, eh? It's things like this that make the rule of thirds effective.
So why do I like the previous shot with Barney the Wonder Dog in the middle of the snow scene? No motion. He's staring straight ahead at the camera, so there is no momentum to counteract. For this reason, in my opinion, it works in the middle, however, it would also work at one of the Rule of Thirds points, if there was something I wanted to crop out of the frame.