Rule of Thirds

Rule of thirds is one of the most important compositions in photography. Rule of thirds is used to create a more dynamic range to your images and help you capture them in a more interesting way.

In the rule of thirds, photos are divided into thirds with two imaginary lines vertically and two lines horizontally making three columns, three rows, and nine sections in the images. Important compositional elements and leading lines are placed on or near the imaginary lines and where the lines intersect.

When taking a photograph with the rule of thirds in mind, it’s always best to compose the photograph in the camera. This is so that you can avoid cropping later to retain as much of the image as possible and avoid reducing the quality of your photographs. However, I encourage going back to some of your older photography and seeing if you can improve them by cropping in a way to make them use the rule of thirds technique.

Rule of Thirds Example: Portraits

Here is an example of a rule of thirds portrait. As you can see, the eyes are lined up with the upper horizontal line and each eye is where the upper horizontal line intersects with a vertical line.

With rule of thirds the idea is to get your most important parts of your image captures where the lines intersect, using this rule when doing portraits and landscapes especially is what makes the image perfect and you get the main focus in the right places.