Composition Week: The Rule of Thirds

Welcome to a feature I'm calling Composition Week! This week we'll be looking at different composition techniques.  But first, a disclaimer.

We're going to be talking about composition techniques. This doesn't mean that when taking a picture you need to focus on the composition techniques you want to use. Rather, consider these tools on your utility belt. That is, things you can use when you want to improve your photographs. With practice, you'll train your eye to see things in terms of composition, and you won't need to think about the 'rules'.  Also, this is art, so don't get too bogged down with trying to use as many of these rules as possible. That said, let's get going.

We’ll start off composition week with one of the more basic rules. This is something that many of you have probably heard about, called the rule of thirds. Basically, the idea is to put the subject of your photograph slightly off center on a line that’s either ⅓ or ⅔ of the way from the edge or top (or both). In the image below, I drew on the ⅓ and ⅔ lines. (The idea is to put the subject on one of the lines or where the lines cross.)

In this picture the park bench is the ‘interesting’ feature. By putting our subject slightly off center, we help lead the viewer’s eye out of the center of our picture, and create visual interest. The rule of thirds also helps us to break up symmetry in our images, which can make for a more natural feeling.

For comparison, here's the same subject (the bench) placed in the center of the frame.

As you can see, the image feels different. The green leaves to the right side of the image make the image feel unbalanced, and the interesting pink leaves on the right fade into the back as a result of this unbalance.