Tag Archives: Rule of Thirds

The 5 Most Abused Rules of Composition

There are many different rules of composition, and it’s hard to know how to use them all correctly. The fact of the matter is that most people never learn how to use most of them, and that leads to some very misused and abused rules.

We’re going to look at some of the worst. Abused either because people don’t know how to use them, or because they think they do.

Each of the subheadings will link to an article where you can learn more about them.

Rules of Composition

Single Point

In my video course, I argue that this is likely the most abused rule of them all, because people don’t really seem to understand that it exists.

The general rule is as follows:

The further you place a single point of interest from the center of the frame, the more interesting it becomes, but the more justifcation you need for it to be there.

When you place a single point in the center for the frame, such as a person’s face, it needs no justification for being there, but it’s by no means interesting.

Conversely, when you place a single point way off into the corner, then it will portray a very different feeling. Have a look at the photo below. I wanted to display a feeling of loniliness and a great expanse by placing the boat in the corner. This would not have been achieved if the boat was in the center of the frame.

Always consider what you’re trying to portray with you photos, as this will dictate your placement.

Rule of Thirds

This is likely the first rule that you ever learned, as it’s probably the most popular rule. The trouble is, some people treat it as gospel, when in reality, it’s just a good guide.

The rule is as follows:

Divide your frame up into thirds – two equally spaced horizontal and vertical lines. Then align important features in the frame with these lines, and the intersect points.

While it’s a very good rule, and it will help to make your photo more interesting, and add depth, it’s not a rule which should be followed blindly. Just because the rule says so, doesn’t mean that you should.

The truth of the matter is that it all comes down to placement, like it does with a single point. Too close to the center and it’s boring, too close to the edge and it’s too drastic. The rule of thirds is there to guide you to a safe area of the frame, where you’re not stepping on any toes, or making dramatic moves with your composition.

While it’s a great rule, and one that you should all know about, you need to consider what you’re trying to convey with your photo. It can start to look very structured if you follow the rule blindly, and that appears to be quite obvious.

Horizon Placement

All too often people think it’s a good idea to place their horizon in the middle of the frame, when in reality, this is just diving the photo in half, and making it look dull.

Here’s the general rule:

If you were to decide that the top half of the frame is much more interesting than the bottom, then you may want to adjust your composition so that the horizon is low in the frame. And vice versa. Find the interesting part of the frame, and adjust the horizon placement to emphasise this.

It’s a great rule, and one you should absolutely follow, although most people don’t.

Think about it. How interesting is a plain blue sky in your photo, compared to what’s happening on the ground? Not very.

Triangles

Triangle have a strong hold on your photos, although it seems that most people don’t quite understand exactly what they do. It all comes down to the apex (Latin for summit, peak, tip, top, extreme end) of the triangle, and where that’s positioned.

The general rule is as follows:

Lines, paths, and points of interest in a photo, are combined to create a triangle. The positioning and direction of this triangle can change the perceived stability of a photo.

Because a triangle has so much control over the stability, you need to be more careful about using the incorrectly, than not using them at all.

For a photo of a building, you would likely have a flat ground at the bottom, with an apex at the top, which appears to be very stable, but if you rotate the angle of your camera, this will start to appear less and less stable.

If you want to make your photo appear unstable, then this is a really powerful rule to be able to control.

Balance

There is some form of balance in every photo we look at, and it’s up to us to determine whether we want the photo to be balanced, or unbalanced.

Here is the general rule:

Balance is at the base of every composition; it determines whether the photo is pleasing and harmonious to look at, or rather uncomfortable and unresolved. It all comes down to visual weight and placement, which decides whether the left side is heavier than the right, or vice versa.

I won’t go into too much detail about balance, because you can read all about it here, but the general gist is that we look at a photo like a weighing scale. If there’s too much going on, on the left, then the photo is unbalanced to the left. Whether we want the photo be balanced or not us up to us, but it pays to know why you may or may not want it to be.

A balanced photo is pleasing and harmonious, and unbalanced photo is uncomfortable and unresolved. Which do you want your photo to be, and more importantly, why?

The more aware you are of the effects of balance on your photos, the better your photography will be, so it pays to think about how you want to portray your image before you pick up your camera. Degrees of balance is at the heart of every photo and can’t be ignored so use it wisely, and remember, that any technique, if used to excess, is going to lose its worth.

Rule of Thirds – 30 Day Photography Challenge Tips

It’s now Day 2 in my 30 Day Photography Challenge, and today’s challenge is to tackle the rule of thirds. This is a great rule, and pretty much the first rule that photographers learn when it comes to composition. Here’s my full article on the Rule of Thirds.

You should read the full article, but I’m going to give you a brief summary of points that you will want to pay attention to when working around the rule of thirds.

Firstly lets have a look at what the rule is.

The rule basically dictates that photos should be split into 9 equal parts; 2 equally-spaced horizontal lines and 2 equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important features within the frame should intersect with these lines at some point.

It looks something like this.

Now you may have noticed that when you come to crop your photos that you’re provided with a guide containing the rule of thirds. This is no accident. It’s best to get it right in the camera and not crop at all, but sometimes, needs must.

Lets start by looking at my photo, which has been poorly cropped. By not paying attention to the rule, the photo is messy, and whereas I was originally looking past the face on the right, it seems to intrude much more into the photo. Overall, this is pretty sloppy composition.

Now lets have a look at the difference when I meet one of the intersect points with the eye of the subject.

Screen shot 2012 05 01 at 13.43.30 Rule of Thirds – 30 Day Photography Challenge Tips

The difference is clear. When you’re composing your photo with the rule of thirds, then it pays to line up important parts of the image with either the lines or the intersect points. The eyes have the strongest visual weight out of anything in this photo, so they’re always an obvious location for an intersect point.

The eye isn’t the only point in the photo that I’ve used though. The light in the background is also located at another intersect point, and there are obvious lines (black at the top, brown at the bottom) on the left side of the frame, which follow the lines of composition. Paying attention to small details like this can make a big difference (and add balance).

The point of using the rule of thirds is that you can create a much more interesting photo. It opens up space in the frame to look into the background and what else is going on in the frame. It works especially well with candid photography because it’s all about providing a sense of detail about what’s going on, without being too intrusive.

It doesn’t just work for photos of people though, there’s also buildings, and landscapes and so on.

If you want to make your photos more interesting, then this is the go-to rule that you should try. Of course, when I say rule, I don’t mean rule (they’re guides really), but they’re called rules to make it easier for us to understand their purpose.

Here’s the final photo, with the grid taken off. It makes it less obvious why this photo works, but we know that it does.

So remember:

The rule of thirds adds depth
Intersect import points at intersect points
Match up important lines to the thirds lines
Be creative and don’t take the rule too seriously
Don’t overdoo it!

Your Photos

Bert Happel

Patrick Connolly

Alex Veliz

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30 Day Photography Challenge Project

This is my brand new 30 day photography challenge, and I want YOU to take part too. For my next 30 posts, I’m going to be providing you with tips on how to take the photos that I’ve listed here, and sharing my own results (and I encourage you to share yours too).

Starting today, I will be posting 5 posts a week on here, as well as over on my Facebook page, Twitter and Pinterest.

As I complete the project, I will be posting links to the different photos and tips as I complete them, and the days below will turn from black to blue (links). Follow through the links for tips on how to take part yourself.

Take Part

If you want to take part yourself, then just come over to my Facebook page, Twitter and/or Pinterest, and share your photos with me and the rest of the community. The best photos will be added to the posts, and shared with tens of thousands of people.

That’s all you need to know really, hope you enjoy these different ideas; they will certainly help you to improve your photography.

The Challenge

Day 1: Self Portrait - Complete! – Your photos added.

Day 2: Rule of Thirds - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 3: Black & White - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 4: Texture - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 5: High Angle – Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 6: Low Angle - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 7: Silhouette - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 8: Sunset - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 9: Bokeh - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 10: Lens Flare – Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 11: Landscape - Complete! - Your photos added.

Day 12: Portrait - Complete!

Day 13: Dynamic Tension - Complete!

Day 14: Light Painting - Complete!

Day 15: Colorful Water Drops - Complete!

Day 16: Balanced - Complete!

Day 17: Unbalanced - Complete!

Day 18: Frame within a Frame - Complete!

Day 19: Panorama - Complete!

Day 20: Depth - Complete!

Day 21: Water Splash - Complete!

Day 22: Slow Sync Flash - Complete!

Day 23: Panning - Complete!

Day 24: Harris Shutter - Complete!

Day 25: Shallow DoF - Complete!

Day 26: Light Graffiti - Complete!

Day 27: Street Photography - Complete!

Day 28: Architecture

Day 29: Night - Complete!

Day 30: Hidden Camera Mirror Photo - Complete!

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A Beginner’s Guide to Composition

Composition is a funny old thing, because it’s common knowledge that learning composition will help your photography, but it’s also something you should never really pay too much consideration too. I always feel that it’s best to teach people composition under the guidance that it’s training a person’s eyes to look at a potential photo in a different way. You should never just blindly follow the ‘rules’, but you can use your new knowledge to shape your photos into something which is much more pleasing to the eye.

Rule of Thirds

This is probably the first compositional rule that any photographer comes across, and that’s for a very good reason – it’s simple and it works. The basic premise is that you divide your camera’s frame up into thirds and plant key objects in these lines, and the composition will work better. This often works really well and if you’ve not learnt much about photography yet – it’s a great way of dramatically improving your photos and make them more interesting. The idea is that the viewer gets to see more than just the subject and is free to, and encouraged, to explore the photo themselves. There are more basic elements of composition to study, but this is great for trying out and getting to grips with compostion.

Here is the full tutorial on the Rule of Thirds.

Visual Weight

Visual weight is different to size or weight as we know it, and it’s largely down to different elements, such as human eyes and writing. When you can understand visual weight a lot more, you’ll start to understand how people look at photos, and how you can position certain elements in a frame to direct the viewers attention. It’s not so much a tool, or a rule, as it is an understanding.

Here is the full tutorial on Visual Weight.

Balance

Balance in a photo has a big affect on how we feel when we look at the photo, as an unbalanced photo can make us feel uneasy, where as a balanced photo, will make us feel more relaxed. It really doesn’t matter whether you choose to make the photo balanced or unbalanced, but you should understand why you’ve chosen one or the other, and have reasons to justify this choice. Again, it’s one of those situations where the more you know, the easier it will be to produce the desired effect.

Here is the full tutorial on Balance.

Eye-Lines

If you take photos of people, then you take photos with eye lines, so it’s important to understand the affect that they have over how we view photos. Seeing as you’re definitely following every tutorial I’ve provided in this guide, you will have a good understanding of visual weight already, so you should understand the power that having a face (and eyes) in a photo has on it. But there’s much more to it than that. Eye-lines have the ability to focus our attention on another part of the photo, as well as producing tension and other photographic elements. Although they’re not physical lines, they can be used as such to produce different elements, such as triangles and vertical lines.

Here is the full tutorial on Looking & Interest.

Triangles

Speaking of triangles, lets have a look at them next. Triangles are in almost everything we see, in one way or another, it’s just a case of distinguishing them and knowing what to do with them. They make great compositional tools as they’re easy to make, manipulate, and are remarkably common. Triangles are a great way of combining different compositional techniques such as lines and paths and using them to create a more interesting part of a photograph, but the best part about using a triangle is their ability to make a photo feel stable or unstable.

The majority of your photos will have three distinguishable points of interest, so it’s just a case of identifying these, and linking them together in a way that makes sense.

Click here for the full tutorial.

A Beginners Guide to Composition

Single Point

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we should really look at what a single point does to a photo, because there’s actually much more to it than meets the eye. When you’re working with a single point of interest in a photo, it’s one of the most basic forms of composition available, so quite a common occurrence and it pays to know what to do with it. A single point can provide interest to an otherwise plain photo, and they’re usually fairly small and contrasting to the rest of the photo. A photo doesn’t need to have any points of interest to be successful though, just have a look at the most expensive photo in the world as an example.

Here’s the full article.

Horizons

When a frame is being divided by a single, dominant line, it’s more often than not, a horizon, as they’re fairly common in outdoor photography, particularly landscapes. If the photo is of nothing particularly interesting, then usually this line becomes the dominant part of the photo for the way in which it separates the frame. Exactly where you place the horizon in a frame can have a huge affect on the image; it’s all about which part of the photo is the most interesting, and how you want to make your viewer feel with the divide.

Frame Within a Frame

Frames are a great way of using a photographic element to lead the viewers eyes into the frame to focus them on a particular point, and the sense of repetition that they can provide, produce depth and a path for the eyes to explore. A photo of a scene with a foreground feature makes for much more interesting build up to the main part of a photo and can, in some cases, carry equal weight to the rest of the photo.

Click here to read the full tutorial.

Dynamic Tension

Dynamic tension is a way of using the energy and movement available in various features of the frame, to draw the eyes out of the picture in contrasting directions. We’ve already looked at a variety of different lines that you can use in a photo to make it more interesting, but dynamic tension takes these lines and adds varying degrees of contrast between them, making them much more interesting. The simplest and most obvious photo that I have that demonstrates dynamic tension is the one below – the lines move out from the center of the photo to edge of the photo.

This is where composition can start to get a little bit more advanced, but tends to lead to more interesting photography, as you take the knowledge that you’ve already learned, and use it to create photos with more depth.

Depth

Speaking of depth, here’s some useful tutorials to produce depth in your photos. It’s another page like this, with links to the relevant articles, but if you’ve got the time, and you want to learn more, then it’s really worth checking out.

When we take a photo with our cameras, we turn a 3D image into just 2D, and that can cause problems when you’re trying to display depth. It has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you’re trying to convey with your photo, but ultimately it holds you back when you’re trying to add depth to a photo.

Click here to check out the full article.

A Beginner’s Guide To Photography

I’ve been writing on this site for a while now, and I’ve put together a lot of good content, but the trouble is that a lot of it can be hard to find, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. This post will walk you though everything that a beginner in photography should learn, and in the order that they’re supposed to learn it. Welcome to my 100th post.

You should know that there is now a video version of this post, and it can be viewed here.

Exposure

The most basic and essential part of photography is exposure. Learning how exposure works will help you to take control of your camera, and take better photos. As you start to learn what shutter speed, aperture and ISO does, you’ll learn about the other effects that each have on your photos, which can produce creative results. If you only have time to learn one aspect of photography, then this is it, as you’ll start to move away from full auto or program modes, and learn how to use your camera properly.

Aperture

If we cover exposure in the order that the light enters the camera, then the aperture always comes first. The linked article will explain aperture in much more detail, but to put it into layman’s terms, the aperture is very simliar to the pupil of your eye – the wider it is, the more light it will let in. There are side effects to using certain apertures, namely depth of field, but we’ll get to that in a post further down the page. I found exposure much more complicated before I learnt the aperture scale, so try to make sure that you memorise it, and understand the f-stop scale, so that you can use the knowledge to take better photos in the future.

The scale is as follows: f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22.

Here is the full tutorial on Aperture.

Shutter Speed

After aperture, comes shutter speed. It will effectively take the amount of light that the lens has let though, and then only use a fraction of a second’s worth (usually), depending on the lighting situation. Different speeds can have different uses. You would want to use a longer speed of around 30 seconds for night photography on a tripod, but you may want a speed of around 1/1000 of a second if you’re shooting a fast moving subject. It all depends on what you’re shooting and how much light you have available. Shutter speed was the first thing I learnt when I got my SLR because I wanted to be able to freeze motion and remove any potential blur. Looking back though, I wish I’d learnt aperture first.

Here is the full tutorial on Shutter Speed.

ISO

Once you’ve decided how much light you’re going to let through to the sensor, it’s then time to decide how much more you need. This may sound confusing, because surely you let in as much light as you need in the first place, right? Wrong. The problem is that you have to be able to change your aperture and shutter speed to suit your shooting situation if you want to get good, and unblurred results, but unfortunately this doesn’t always provide you with enough light. This is when you can then decide to increase your ISO to make the camera more sensitive to the light. Watch out though, because the higher the ISO, the more grain the camera will produce. More about that in the full post though.

Here is the full tutorial on ISO.

Understanding Your Camera

Metering Modes

Rather awkwardly for beginners, exposure isn’t as simple as learning about aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you also have to learn about how your camera looks at light. There are different metering modes, that can be used for different lighting situations, which will better instruct your camera how your want it to expose. This is especially important if you’re not shooting on manual because you leave part of the exposure up to the camera. By using various metering modes such as ‘spot metering’ you can completely change the amount of light going into the camera. Understanding this may just be the key to understanding why your photos are coming out underexposed.

Here is the full tutorial on Metering Modes.

Depth of Field

When you’re shooting in low light, you invariably have to widen your aperture to allow enough light into the lens, but this has one rather major side effect – shallow depth of field. This can be used very creatively, often to excess, but it’s not all good. There are many situations, such as group photos, where you’ll want to have a narrower aperture so that you can get everyone in focus. This tutorial will walk you though everything you need to know about choosing the right aperture for the right situation.

Here is the full tutorial on Depth of Field.

White Balance

White balance is something I wish I’d learnt more about much sooner than I did, because I look back on some photos now and wonder what I was thinking. The white balance changes the colour cast of the entire photo, and is responsible for the warmth of a photo. It is effectively shifting the colour from blue to orange, from cold to warm, and it does so depending on which balance you choose. Auto white balance doesn’t tend to do a particularly good job, particularly with tungsten light, so the sooner you learn how to control it yourself, the more accurate your photos will look.

Here is the full tutorial on White Balance.

Focal Length

This was actually the first tutorial that I wrote, because at the time, it wasn’t something I understood too well. Have you ever wondered what the millimeter on your lens actually means? Or why people use longer focal lengths for portraits? It’s all discussed in this tutorial, as the focal length affects more than just the zoom, it changes the perspective too. I also cover which focal length you would use in certain situations, as well as their possible side effects. It’s really a worthwhile read and one of my favourite tutorials to date.

Here is the full tutorial on Focal Length.

Crop Factor

A lot of you may not realise it, but unless you spend about $3000 on your camera, then you’re more than likely going to be shooting on a crop sensor. That basically means that your sensor is smaller than professional SLR cameras, and that basically crops the image. This has a range of effects on your photos, as it’ll crop the image to a narrower viewing angle, and will influence your choice of lens purchases in the future. This tutorial is a must for any beginner photographer who wants to understand their camera more.

Here is the full tutorial on the Crop Factor.

The Nifty Fifty

What can I say about the nifty fifty? What’s not to love? For those of you that don’t know, when I talk about the nifty fifty, I’m talking about the 50mm f/1.8 prime lens that can be picked up very cheap for most digital SLRs. It’s a great introduction to buying better quality lenses, and an excellent way of getting to grips with aperture. The article linked is a review and a guide, and I wrote it because I recommend this lens as the first upgrade that every beginner photographer should make. It’s easy to use, and for the price, will yield some excellent results.

Here is the full tutorial on the 50mm f/1.8.

Composition

It’s important to understand exposure, but if you can’t get to grips with basic composition, then you’ll struggle to take really good photos. I’m not saying that good photos always include compositional rules, because that’s often far from true, but it helps to learn these rules so that you can forget them in the future. That may sound stupid, but these rules are really only guides, and the more you know about them, the better your understanding will be of how a photo works.

Rule of Thirds

This is probably the first compositional rule that any photographer comes across, and that’s for a very good reason – it’s simple and it works. The basic premise is that you divide your camera’s frame up into thirds and plant key objects in these lines, and the composition will work better. This often works really well and if you’ve not learnt much about photography yet – it’s a great way of dramatically improving your photos and making them more interesting. The idea is that the viewer gets to see more than just the subject and is free to, and encouraged, to explore the photo themselves.

Here is the full tutorial on the Rule of Thirds.

Visual Weight

Visual weigh is different to size or weight as we know it, and it’s largely down to different elements, such as human eyes and writing. When you can understand visual weight a lot more, you’ll start to understand how people look at photos, and how you can position certain elements in a frame to direct the viewers attention. It’s no so much a tool, or a rule, as it is an understanding.
Here is the full tutorial on Visual Weight.

Balance

Here is the full tutorial on Balance.

This was my 100th tutorial today, so I hope you’ve gotten something out of it, I know I’ve gotten a lot out of writing them. If you have any questions, please come over to Facebook and I’ll be happy to help. Thanks, Josh.

9 Ways to Create an Interesting Background in Your Photos

Why is it Important to have an Interesting Background?

You may have noticed by now that I've not put any photos of a model on a white background on this site, and there's a good reason for this – I find these photos boring and unimaginative and the shooting environment unconducive to interesting photography. You see, the way I see it, is that every pixel in a photo have an equal amount of importance and it's your job, as the photographer, to ensure that each part of the photo looks good.

When you start to make your backgrounds more interesting, you'll find that people spend more time looking at them, often without them realising the appeal of the photo. There are plenty of ways to do this, and we're gonna have a little look at some of them now.

Bokeh

This is a term that I've used a few times on this website and spoke in detail about in this post, but essentially, it’s the aesthetic quality of out-of-focus areas of a photograph. If you have a close subject, a distant background and a wide aperture, then you magnify the bokeh effect. Check out the photo below, and you'll the soft circular blur in the background which is an example of good bokeh. In this photo, the background has as much appeal to the viewer as the subject – the BBQ. I really like using a strong bokeh as the softness of it all is very appealing and easy to look at.

Lights

When light shines directly into the camera's lens and the aperture isn't too wide then it produces some really cool 'star' effects on the light source. As well as lighting up the background and providing interesting detail, it also lights the subject in a way in which you don't typically see. Use the lighting to illuminate your background and provide a point of interest by arranging your lights so that they provide details to the most important parts of your background.

High ISO

If you're shooting at night, you're going to need to raise your ISO if you want to reveal any detail in your background. Even in the photo above, I used an ISO of 1200 as it allowed me to see all the finer details that attracted the viewer to the photo. The photo below was shot with an on-camera, external flash unit at ISO 1600 and an aperture of f/2.8. As you can see, this has produced a very shallow DoF, but turned a photo of a man on a street into much more than that, by providing much more detail.

Rule of Thirds

As you can probably see from the photos I've use so far, I like to adhere roughly to the rule of thirds when trying to include an interesting background. The rule basically dictates that photos should be split into 9 equal parts; 2 equally-spaced horizontal lines and 2 equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important features within the frame should intersect with these lines at some point. This allows me to actually include a background that people can actually see.

Background Subjects

There's no reason why your background can't also be another subject, like I've done in the photo below. This, believe it or not was a candid photo and the foreground subject was looking in the same direction as the background subject, and it was at the exact point that he looked towards my camera that I took the photo. This contrast in subject's interest makes you wonder where to look and stops becoming a simple photo of a person. Contrast in background and foreground is key here.

Lines

I'm written in depth about horizontal, vertical, diagonal and converging lines in photography and the power that they have to direct the viewers eyes in a certain direction and I recommend that you read about that in further detail. The great part about using lines in your background is that they're remarkable subtle – you may like the background in my photo, but without mentioning lines, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that interests you. Once again, there's contrast present in the photography, but this time it's also present in the background – the lines are sharp and soft.

Paths

The great thing about paths in photography is that if you include a subject as well, they can provide dynamic tension. By this I mean that your eyes don't know whether to go up and down the subject of down the path which causes a tension in your eyes. This is a superb trick to convince your viewer to look at the photo for longer without them even realising why. The added sense of wonder is what keeps the viewer entertained.

Background Focus

Sometime, I like to use a frame within a frame to focus the attention towards the background. In the photo below, I've used two parts of a banister to act as a sort of tunnel, directing the attention towards the subject. Frames do an excellent job of providing context to a photo while adding a soft border by providing an out-of-focus blur around the edge of the primary subject.

Colour

This is at the end of the list because it's probably one the easiest techniques to implement, especially if the colours you're using in the background contrast with the colours in the foreground like mine does below. The contrast is the most important point to make here because if your foreground and background are too similar, they merge into one, and cease to be two effective and different points of interest. I love using colour in my photography when possible as it really helps to make the photos stand out from the rest of an album.