Photography Composition - 12 Composition Rules for Your Photos to Shine By James Carren

Rule of Thirds
I want to start out with the rule of thirds because it was the first rule I learned as a new
photographer. It’s very useful for changing up your composition in interesting ways, and
it’s very simple. Basically, despite what a lot of people believe, you just don’t want to put
your subject in the middle of the frame. Now, you might be thinking, “But I know one of
the other elements of design is balance.” And you’d be right. But there are a lot of other
ways to create a much more dynamic sense of balance than to have everything smack in
the middle of the frame.
Granted, there are times where centering your subject can work out, such as: if there is a
lot of movement or action in the background, if the subject in the middle is balanced by
other items in the midground, background, or foreground, as the case may be, or if you put
the subject just imperceptibly to one side of the middle. If you are a practiced
photographer, I would suggest that you experiment with these techniques and see what
you think. If you are a brand new photographer, odds are you’ve been centering things in
your work since you started, so I want to completely break that notion for you.
In order to effectively illustrate the rule of thirds, it would be helpful for you to either take
out a print that you have or to pull one up in Photoshop. Using two horizontal lines and
two vertical lines, divide the entire photo into thirds. Illustratively, you should end up with
nine squares. What you want to see once you’ve done this is that the subject of the photo
does not fall smack in the middle three squares. It’s fine if the subject does fall within
them, but it needs to also fall more to the left or the right. This technique creates more
dynamism within the photo, allowing your eye to travel to it and then around the frame.
Believe it or not, when you trap the subject right in the middle of the frame, the eye goes
straight to it, as intended, but then has nowhere to travel to. The viewer gets stuck, and
that is why centered photos are boring.