"Rule" of 3rds

The "rule" is a good place to start. It pushes the focal point off center and makes one think about the interaction or motion through the frame. It allows one to start telling a story or saying something instead of capturing an image with an object in it.

Hi Darren!

Very nice summary.

As an engineer, underlying rules in nature/biology, often not obvious, are not unknown to me Also, a rule of thumb approximation like "golden ratio -> rule of thirds" doesn't ruffle my feathers

However, thinking about the fact that even our lifes and actions are to some extent governed by underlying rules that can be described mathematically is somewhat strange...

Well, I guess this is not really the place to discuss the issues of "free will" and such...

Cheers
Jens

--

'Well, 'Zooming with your feet' is usually a stupid thing as zoom rings are designed for hands.' (Me, 2006)
http://www.JensRoesner.de

MikeAusA200 said:

During my brief experience as TV cameraman 3 decades ago, I was told
to always keep the nose in the centre of the frame.

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because when the head is turned, it gives you "look space", a concept that appears to be relatively unknown in the still photo world... the only time you'd want a dead center straight-on shot might be for the field reporter doing the evening news, which isn't very artistic to begin with.

texinus gave us good examples of look space, but he didn't realize it... look at the direction of the stare, notice how that side of the pic has more space... even the background of the short side serves to accent the look space:



same thing, notice how eli is not perfectly centered, his body is turned slightly, and the background is once again on the short side of the centering:



here the background is giving us the asymetrical component, even if clint is dead centered in the pic:



tilted head creating tension:



all of that framing works because of the asymetrical component, even if it's not your perfectly defined rule of thirds.

--
dan

So your not a student of "psychohistory"?......."The basis of psychohistory is the idea that, while the actions of a particular individual could not be foreseen, the laws of statistics could be applied to large groups of people and used to predict the general flow of future events"................
Free will fine but your still "stuck"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_%28fictional%29

To add even less to the discussion I really like the rule of thirds (I'm a thirds-idian)

This image wouldn't work at all w/ anything truely centered (and I really want to crop some off thet right side to make it "better"..... (well it still may not work but I like it. BTW: Used the cc40m filter,big problem was I had iso at 1600 so I just "punted" here... One big thing is eye travel, regardless of composition if your eye is forced to drift off the image, it usually isn't a working image. Find the triangles that force your eye back to the center. WE are math



--
360 minutes from the prime meridian. (-5375min, 3.55sec) 1093' above sea level.

'The exposure meter is calibrated to some clearly defined standards and the user needs to adjust his working method and his subject matter to these values. It does not help to suppose all kinds of assumptions that do not exist.'
Erwin Puts

Darren M said:

While the rule of thirds is the most talked about rule, possibly the
most useful and likely the most easily described, it is not the only
compositional rule one should know.

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. . . and to add to that.

There are many rules/guidelines/tips that you can follow to produce a photo with composition that will make it striking.

The Rule of Thirds is one rule

• it is not the only rule for striking compsition
• it does not suggest that other rules are wrong
• it is not the best rule to use in all circumstances

--
Mike . Sydney, Australia
http://www.pbase.com/mikeaus/galleries
http://s23.photobucket.com/albums/b356/MikeAus/?

jlhcarl said:

I like to use the guide line "If it looks good to me shoot it"

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But that's the thing...often what we see is not what the photograph shows, because of the selective attention focus of the brain. Same reason why wire lines, posts out of peoples heads and etc. show up "unexpectedly" at pictures.

The hard part of photography, which I am only beginning to start to commencing to understand, is that looking is not seeing.

--
Thiago Silva - http://www.flickr.com/photos/thiagosilva/

• Pent K One Hundred Dee, Eighteen-fifty five, Fifty-two hundred, Forty limited, Fifity M F One point seven.

'If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera. ' - (Lewis Hine)

Absolutely, Mike. I found that Ron Bigelow has a great series of articles on composition on his site (www dot ronbigelow dot com/articles/adv_comp/adv_comp.htm).
--
Daniel Ansari
GMT-05:00

JensR said:

JensR said:

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Well, symmetry of course
Hard to see something ruleofthirdish here - I therefore conclude that
I can't like the shot. Sorry.

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Jens, heel and toe are are at 1/3 points. Feel free to enjoy. ;-)

BTW, great shots, José!

Tim

dakotapix said:

dakotapix said:

Well, symmetry of course
Hard to see something ruleofthirdish here - I therefore conclude that
I can't like the shot. Sorry.

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Jens, heel and toe are are at 1/3 points. Feel free to enjoy. ;-)

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Hm, I don't know why, somehow this shot starts to grow on me...

dakotapix said:

BTW, great shots, José!

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Yep!

Cheers
Jens

--

'Well, 'Zooming with your feet' is usually a stupid thing as zoom rings are designed for hands.' (Me, 2006)
http://www.JensRoesner.de

From freshman college years - let's see the principles of design and composition:

1. Symmetry and Balance
2. Rule of Thirds
3. Contrast (color, shape, texture)

err... I don't remember the rest. )
Nols
--
'Ask not what your camera can do for you...' (oh well, you know how this ends)

JensR said:

Hm, I don't know why, somehow this shot starts to grow on me...

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Good to know that! This is one of my favourite photos, and also one of the most under-appreciated. It's certainly not as eye-candy as most of my other photos. I know that many viewers don't like descriptions along with the photos, but anyway here goes the official description of this image:

"Title: Scar

Just found this scar along many others, deeply imprinted in a piece of land. I wonder if the earth dried and broken into pieces, after feeling all the weight that humans put on her...

José Ramos"

Thanks for your words!

--
José Ramos
http://www.joseramos.net (nature/landscape photography)

--
Galleries: http://www.dheller.net

Hello leopold:

That looks more like a glacier!!!...But thanks for caring...

LW

leopold said:

Hi,
it's because sometimes you don't have the choice,because of the light
available and the ISO your shooting etc...

Here is another milky one for you

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leopold said:

leopold
pentax forever

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Hello Jose:

After awhile enough is enough for me and they become boring and yeah not even close to being real or pure...

Sooner or later something else will become the trend and then I'll have to get bored all over again...

I think Picasso and Dali probably broke almost every rule there was and they seemed to have prospered...

There is too much of this everyone else is doing it and all the books say to do it this way...Boring!!!...

LW

José Ramos said:

Larry Winters said:

Hello:

Not only that I'm getting sick of all these creamy waterfall/stream
shots...They were cool at first but EVERY damn shot is that way
now...When's the last time anyone saw milk running down a waterfall
or stream?...I'll take a good ole splash anytime...

LW

Click to expand...

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Hello Jens:

You have demonstrated where one can slow the shutter down just a tad to still create that flow look but fast enough to maintain the pure artistic nature of the stream...Well done...

LW

JensR said:

JensR said:

it's because sometimes you don't have the choice,because of the light
available and the ISO your shooting etc...

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Yeah, terrible!





Glad you got that milky shot, though. Now I'm thirsty.

Cheers
Jens

--
'Well, 'Zooming with your feet' is usually a stupid thing as zoom
rings are designed for hands.' (Me, 2006)
http://www.JensRoesner.de

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thiago_silva said:

snip =

The hard part of photography, which I am only beginning to start to
commencing to understand, is that looking is not seeing.

--
Thiago Silva - http://www.flickr.com/photos/thiagosilva/
snip -

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Well said - here is another quote - one I have used to excess before from the late curator of photography at MOMA.
"The truth is that anybody can make a photograph.
The trouble is not that photographs are hard to make.
The trouble is that they are hard to make intelligent and interesting”
John Szarkowski 2000 1925-2007

It's the third line that keeps me going - and it's the third line that keeps me frustrated.

I use any rule, break any rule, sit, stand, squat, lie down, go inverted, get closer, move back, shoot with the light, into the light, curse the light, praise the light and become one with the light. Just to find that one intelligent and interesting image.

We are all nuts.

--
PDL

Its all bull and will hold back anyone's developement like crazy for years. Its an addiction that produced some of the worlds most inhumane boring buildings and which has ruined the work of literally hundreds of reportage photographers, because it is an addiction, and an obsession and is unhealthy. Great photographs are their subject matter, the moment, the lighting, the colour etc and composition is neanderthal. It is a backward-looking art-world fixated step, and I used to paint etc and went to college and know perfectly well how contemporaries were made to feel inferior as human beings, like women without the vote, if their work did not comply to the Golden Section. Like there's a war going on.... and we must still arrange the bomb craters and dead bodies according to some primitive discovery that produced really boring inhumane buildings (greece and rome) 2000+ years ago.

Love of your subject is all you need. Does love keep to the rules? (I'm terribly sorry Darling, have to say no, until you have had a nose job, a breast job, a nip and tuck here, and a tan all over and have lost both arms, I'm really not interested!).

Well?

thiago_silva said:

...often what we see is not what the photograph
shows, because of the selective attention focus of the brain. Same
reason why wire lines, posts out of peoples heads and etc. show up
"unexpectedly" at pictures.

Click to expand...

That sounds like a good explanation of why I find it easier to compose the picture on my flip-out screen than looking through an OVF. Looking at the screen you see the scene exactly as you will when you look at it later - and all those things show up far more easily.

I don't expect that will convince anyone though )

The rule of thirds, by the way is just a way around the fact that your image space does not comply to the golden section anyway. To create a rectangle that does, first draw a square. 2. get a compass and placing the pencil end on a dagonally opposite corner, draw the arc of the circle down to meet the line that extends from the corner the point of the compass is on. 3. Then, placing a set square on that same line at the point where the pencil line from the compass intersects it, create a rectangle whose length is that extension of the square.

That then is an oblong shape that IS NOT 4:3 or 3:2 or 1:1. When you have found a sensor that is that proportion let me know, but if you do, it wont help you.

I used 4:3 digicams initially and got so used to the TV shape I found even trying to stretch to 3:2 difficult, although I had had years of using it with film.

Try a hasselblad or Bronica or Rolleiflex type square thingy. What you notice about the shape is that it is in itself static compared to 3:2. Squares arent going anywhere, they are like circles compared to ovals.

The reason reportage is mostly 3:2 is that dynamic shape, nothing to do with composition at all, yet much of the best fashion photography involving models is on static shaped machines.They can crop in either direction from the square. In the real world however, just as there are no straight lines (cough) so too there is movemrnt and 3:2 has a stretched shape that is going from A to B.

That's why 4:3 DSLRs have a hard time of it with pros. It's a much better easier shape to compose within, much. It just does not move or go anywhere much.

In the same way an Xpan landscape, though superficially coool, is unsatisfactory, because the landscape, the SUBJECT- is itself unmoving. The Xpan pics that show movement on the other hand, however chaotic, make sense because the shape is perfect for action pics per se.

In my first rant it was monkey see, monkey do. This one is the horses for courses bit. Size matters, and so does shape.
--
narayana

Jose,
I really like these shots, especially the second one. Great stuff!
Dan
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