The Basics: Rule of Thirds

Welcome to the first article for the newly relaunched Wild Nature Photography. I hope you like what you see here and I am looking forward to sharing my experiences and knowledge with you over many forthcoming articles.

In this first article we’ll cover one of the most basic rules of photography, the “Rule of Thirds”.

You would think that most everyone who does any type of photography would be familiar with this rule, however the more photographers I meet the more I find that 1) have never heard of it, 2) had heard about it but did not understand it, or 3) had heard of it in the past and had forgotten about it.

So let’s do a quick review:

The most effective images are those that convey a sense of movement or motion, this is specially true with wildlife. Placing your subject right smack in the middle of the image, in most cases, will make the subject appear somewhat static, lacking motion, even lacking life. The Rule of Thirds provide a quick and easy guideline for subject placement within the frame while providing a pleasant composition and imparting a sense of dynamism to your subject.

Let’s take a look at a quick example.

American Pika, Beartooth Range, MT

This is very nice image of an American Pika, (BTW, a species that is now listed as threatened), however you can see how the subject is right smack in the center of the image.

Let’s quickly apply the rule of thirds here to see if we can improve things. Simply envision a Tic-Tac-Toe grid super-imposed on your image, got it? Now on this grid you will see 4 points were the lines intersect, can you see them? The rule of thirds proclaims that you should place your subject, or at least your subjects “center of gravity” in one of these intersections.

Lets now take a look at this same image with the rule of thirds grid:

You can quickly see that this image is centered, now lets try moving the subject to place it’s “center of gravity” at one of the grid intersections and see if that will improve the image:

I think this looks much better, but note that I did not place the eye on the lower right intersection, but our subjects “center of gravity”. I think this is much improved over our first image. Now let’s take a look without the grid.

The difference is subtle, but it certainly makes the image stronger and more pleasant to look at. Applying the rule of thirds here has accomplished a few things very quickly; 1) removed the negative space we had behind our subject and 2) given our subject some more space to “look or move into”. This is a very subtle but effective composition tool, providing your subject more room in front than to the rear.

Let’s compare what we started with and our final image:

Again a subtle change, but a very effective one.

Now that we understand what the rule of thirds is all about, we can go about breaking it! Yes, rules are meant to be broken, as a matter of fact I don’t consider any rules in photography to be “rules” but more like a set of guidelines. There are times, were placing your subject right smack in the middle will provide the most effective and compelling composition, specially when you have very strong subjects, here are a couple of examples:

Mountain Goat, Beartooth Range, MT

Luna Moth, Chatham County, NC

In these two examples you can see our subjects dead center, but in these two cases the compositions work very well.

I hope you found this post useful.

Feel free to post questions and/or comments in the comments section below.

Juan