Rule of Thirds

21/11/09

RULE OF THIRDS

Is a phrase that you may have heard, but not quite understood. In simple terms what it means is that you place the main element of your photograph not slap right bang in the middle of the frame, but somewhat off to the side, ie: about in the first third or last third of the frame.

Let’s take an example. This is a grab shot taken of a horseman at Petra in Jordan.
























































As you can see he is sat fair and squarely in the middle of the frame, and whilst it’s OK, it is nothing special, beyond being a tourist type snap. The first thing l did to the image was apply a Lightroom Preset called “ Middle Blue -1 soft portrait “























































This of course has not addressed the problem of the main party of the image being stuck slap bang in the middle of the frame. I now approach the question of converting the image more to comply with the Two Thirds Rule, and accordingly apply a crop to the right side and top of the image.


























































I hope that you can see that this crop now makes the image more appealing to the eye. You will also note that as well as cropping the right hand side of the image to create the Thirds Rule change, l have also removed the sky. A professional photographer once told me that unless sky was an integral part of your image, don't include it if you don't have to.


You can see from the images 1, 2 and 3, that the subject matter is somewhat on the dark side, so l therefore apply a little bit of fill light to bring out the detail.

























































Having done that, my eye is now drawn to the background, which for my taste is a little on the light side, so using “ Dodge and Burn “ l darken the background down until l achieve the level that pleases me.




























































Below l now reproduce the first and the last images for comparison, and l think you can readily see a distinct improvement, brought about primarily by applying the Rule of Thirds. I do, however appreciate that l have enhanced the final image somewhat by the application of Lightroom presets, and therefore to enable a more direct comparison, the middle image produced below is shown without the presets. This should enable a more clearer comparison between the first, non Thirds image, and the image cropped to comply with the Thirds Rule.

I could of course have saved myself the effort of going through the process if at the time of taking the image, l'd have placed the central character in the last third of the frame, and then pressed the shutter. This of course is more easily dealt with when dealing with images that don't have a tendency to prance around somewhat.