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- Course on PHOTOGRAPHY N°1: The rule of thirds
Course on PHOTOGRAPHY N°1: The rule of thirds
Course on PHOTOGRAPHY N°1: The rule of thirds
Welcome to this new Photophiles course dedicated to photography.
If you are interested in photography you have certainly heard of the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds says that an image will have more force if you place the subject on the lines of force or at the intersection of the strong points.
The lines of force are located on each third of the image. So split your image into 3 parts horizontally and 3 parts vertically of roughly equal width. The points that are at the intersection of the lines are going to be highlights of the image.
If you prefer the video format, you can also find the entire course in the video below:
The author of this photo of a tree in a field is Realworkhard (photo under CC0 license) He chose to put the line of wheat on the first third of the image with two thirds of the sky.
He placed the tree on the first third of the photo vertically and the foot of the tree at the strong point at the bottom left of his composition, which allows you to immediately guide the gaze towards this tree which is the subject of the image.
I take another example (Photo by StockSnap) a jogger; same the author placed it in the second vertical third of the image. That is to say that it is on a vertical line of force. He left space, that is to say space in the direction where the jogger is going, which is generally what we do to give the impression of movement.
Here on an image of Paul Naude. Same principle, the character is in the first third. It’s a very tight portrait as you see. I have a line of force which passes approximately at the level of the mouth, and one approximately at the level of the eyes. To accentuate the impression of daydreaming, the author has left some space in the right part in the area targeted by the young girl’s gaze. This is what makes it possible to have a pleasant composition. This image is much more interesting like that than if the author had simply chosen to center his photo, that is to say to have the background also in the left part and to have placed his subject in the middle of the image.
This rule of thirds when you have not succeeded in applying it from the shooting, you can obviously crop your images to apply it afterwards. Especially since we now have many pixels in our camera, so we can quite afford to lose a few when cropping.
For example in this photo, it is not always easy on a sailboat to position it well in a third of the image. I can then use the crop tool in Photoshop. With this tool, handles are displayed, I hold down the temporary Shift key (SHIFT) to keep the proportions and I click and drag on one of the handles in the corner.
When I crop, Photoshop indicates the lines of the thirds, so I will position my subject, the skipper of the small sailboat, on the second third of the image which will give him more field in front of the sailboat. I validate the framing with the Enter key. If we compare this image and the previous one, the gaze is immediately more attracted to the main subject. It also gives more dynamics to your sailboat which somehow moves faster.
The rule of thirds can also be used vertically. In this photo, I can absolutely use the crop tool to position my character on the first third of the image.
Same thing if I want to accentuate the impression of movement, I will position the jogger on this first line of thirds so that there is scope in front of the character. If, conversely, I want to indicate a blocking situation for one reason or another with a subject that would lend itself to it, I would do the opposite; I would position it against the edge of the image.
Same principle, if we look at the two images, we have an impression of dynamism accentuated by this composition which uses the rule of thirds.
The rule of thirds is something quite easy to use and it is something that you also have to know how to forget sometimes.
It all depends on the subjects. Here is a counter-example of the rule of thirds: the author has chosen to accentuate the symmetry of the image precisely by doing the opposite of the rule of thirds, i.e. by centering his subject, the castle, exactly in the middle of the image to accentuate this effect of symmetry. So it’s important to know the rule of thirds and also important to know how to forget it.
See you soon for the rest of this course, remember to subscribe to the Photophiles newsletter to be informed of the publication of new courses.
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Thank you to the authors of these photographs released under CC0 license
READ THE NEXT COURSE : Course N°2 on mass balance in photography
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