Composition - The Rule of Thirds

This is a simple rule to follow and one that I find myself using quite often. Wikipedia defines this compositional rule like this:

The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections.

Let me translate that. Remember when you were a kid and you played Tic-Tac-Toe. Ok some of us still do! Well play tic-tac-toe through your view finder. When you are framing up an image imagine a Tic-Tac-Toe board on it. Place the point of interest on one of the places where the lines going up and down and accross meet. According to this rule of thumb it will help make a stronger image.

Take the picture from a soccer match I shot. When I framed up the image I intentionaly placed the soccer ball on an intersection of lines. This serves to bring your attention to the point of focus in the image, the ball and the soccer match.



Now their are some other thing you can do with that Tic-Tac-Toe board while you have it in you head. If you are shooting a landscape and you want to emphaize the land and not the sky, try putting the horizon on the top line of the Tic-Tac-Toe board or if you want to emphaize the sky place it on the bottom one.

If you are setting up a shot with motion in it try and place the subject on the left colum or the right column of the Tic-Tac-Toe board, leaving space ahead of the subject for them to walk into when the picture is done. Again look at the image from the soccer match. I have the player a little left of where I really want him, in fact that is one of the things that weakens the image. If I had nailed him to the right line and given him the rest of the image to run into it would have been a better shot. Oh well...maybe next week I will get a better shot.

If you use this rule often you just start shooting that way and you don't have to think about it. However be careful not to fall into that trap too. For now go out and try the rule of thirds and see if you don't like your results a little more.

One note: If you are an Adobe Lightroom user, the crop tool in that product is defualted to show you the rule of thirds when cropping. you can change it to other methods to. I will share more onthat later.

Keep the shutters clickin'!

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