Sunday, May 18, 2008

Rules: The Rule of Thirds

I was thinking about this the other day, and how when i first started taking photos everyone was speaking about the rules of thirds, and i had really no idea what they were talking about so i'd though i share my interpretation on this rule.

What is the rule of thirds?

Well its when you divided your "iamge" into 3 vertical and horizontal lines like on the image below:



So whats this for really?

Theoretically speaking if you place interesting things or points of interest in the intersections of the lines or along the lines your photos will become more balanced and will help the viewer of the image to interact better with the photograph.

Its also said in some studies, that when a person is looking at an image it will go to one of these points instead of going right into the middle of the image, so thus using the rule of thirds works with this natural way of viewing an image rather than working against it.


I would also like to point out that breaking the rules of thirds can cause for some striking images, i have done it a couple of time and pulled of some pretty good photographs. But then i have tried in other situations and failed as well!
Also taken into account this rule when your editing your photos, you can crop the image so it follows the rules and thus you have a photo that will look better. And please don't you ever dare to place the horizon in the middle of the image, thus just cuts of the images horribly in my opinion and its the most common way of breaking the rule!

1 comment:

just me. said...

Nice tip, for those whom don't know it ... and since you've allways been helpfull, I would like to share a quick trick you can do in photoshop to check your crops and/or noncrops against a grid, its pretty much just an idea, and I do it like 3 times a month ... but anyways, its good to know about it :p So basically what you do is :

a. Go to the Edit / Preferences / Guides, grids, slices & count submenu;
b. Into the Grid tab set the "Gridline every" option to 33.333 *percent* (select it from the drop down near the place where you input the value);
c. Below the "Gridline every" option you should have another option called "Subdivisions", modify that one to read 1;
d. Hit ok, and load some image, you can now display the grid by going to the View / Show / Grid submenu.

Enjoy