Oh those amateur photographers—they love to put their main subjects in the center of every picture they take. GET OFF THE CENTER PEOPLE. I’m sorry for sounding a bit rude, but I learned this in class last week and I got really excited about it. Apparently, when something is in the middle of a photograph, it is usually dead or viewed as plain and boring. Now they tell me. To make your pictures more interesting and more appealing to the eye, you have to think in terms of thirds or circles.
Rule of Thirds
The basic idea behind this rule is that you have to first split your picture frame into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. You then have to identify your main subject of interest, and place it on any of the points where the lines intersect. The diagram shown may help you understand the concept. You should always aim for one of the red dots. The Digital Photography School does a great job explaining this rule with some examples.
According to the Digital Photography School, “The theory is that if you place points of interest in the intersections or along the lines that your photo becomes more balanced and will enable a viewer of the image to interact with it more naturally.”
Think Circles
I’ll try my best to explain this. Most pictures have more than one subject or point. Take for example the picture of a friend of mine and me
barbequing, which by the way, is not a good picture according to the photography education I gained in the toolkit class. The subjects or levels include my friend, Kareem, me in the navy-blue Polo shirt, the burgers, the barbeque grill and the background. But the subjects are all crumpled in the photo, and you can’t tell what or who is the main focus of this image.
According to Professor McAdams, it is best to organize your subjects in terms of circles. Your main point of interest should stand out first, then your second point of interest and so on. The diagram I made may help.
Professor McAadams ended up the discussion about the rule of thirds and circles by saying, “even when you think something should be in the middle, don’t put it in the middle. Move it up or down.”
In class, we also looked at the 2005 year in pictures from MSNBC. It is a slide show of the best pictures of 2005 according to experts, and the favorite picture of 2005 according to readers. When I saw the pictures first in class, I was impressed by their beauty and meaning. I viewed them again with an eye for the rule of thirds. Now I am even more impressed by the technique in which they were taken.
Eisa,
I like how you have summarized the points learned in class using your own pictures. Very creative. It served as a good review for me. Also, thanks for the Digital Photography School link. I found some very useful info here!
[...] well as when Mindy visually explained it to us using actual photographs and grids. My classmate, Eisa, also did a nice job of recapping what we were taught in class on his blog using his own [...]
Hey, good job, what a lecture… it has to do with the perception of equilibrium that human beings have. For example, do you know that the Athena’s Parthenon, although it seems to be perfectly balanced, it is not? It’s irregular. “Entasis refers to the slight bulge of the columns as they rise, though the observable effect on the Pathenon is considerably more subtle than on earlier temples with their noticeably cigar-shaped columns. It is not univerally agreed what the intended effect of these ‘optical refinements’ was; it is often suggested that it was to enliven what might have appeared an inert mass in the case of a building without curves, but the comparison ought to be with the Parthenon’s more obviously curved predecessors than with a notional rectangular temple.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon
You know, the photo rule summary was helpful to me, but this entry was even more helpful to me as an illustration of what can be done with blogs and the usefulness of them. In general, I find links rather distracting, but here they are used in a very useful way to supply more information on the topic rather than just lead the reader off on a tangent.