Photography’s Golden Rule

I often see people taking pictures by simply pointing their camera at what they want and then pressing the shutter button. With the main subject smack in the middle of the frame without giving any further thought to composition. Do you do that? It’s easy and perhaps serves it’s purpose. You get a picture of whatever it is you want to have a picture of. But as a photograph, the result is often a bit disappointing to look at afterwards, especially if there’s a whole stack of photos looking almost the same. But knowing some of the basics about composition can significantly improve the look and feel of your photos.

Rule Of Thirds

The rule of thirds is probably the most talked about of the compositional “rules”. Simply stated, it tells you to place the main focus of attention a third into the frame. It can be a third from the left or right, and it can be a third from the top or bottom of the frame. The most attention-grabbing points are the 4 points that are located a third into the frame from both left/right + top/bottom. A third into the frame from each corner, that is. For thousands of years it has been known that our eyes give particular attention to these points.

It is also known as “The Golden Rule”, “The Golden Cut”, “The Divine Proportion” and Eudoxos’ rule.

If you like math and science, you might be interested to know that it can be derived from Fibonnaci’s series of numbers. If you’ve ever seen or read Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code”, you’ll perhaps remember the “magic” series of numbers, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55... Each number in the series is obtained by adding the two previous numbers together. Hence, the next number will be 55+34=89. Now you get the “divine proportion” by dividing any two numbers that are separated by one other number. The higher the numbers you use, the more exact it will be. When we call it “the rule of thirds”, we use two of the lower numbers, ‘1’ and ‘3’ (separated by ‘2’ in the series). 1 divided by 3 is one-third. To get a more exact “divine proportion”, we can use two of the higher numbers: ‘21’ divided by ‘55’ (separated by ‘34’ in the series) which is 0.38, slightly more than one-third.

But all this is mostly of theoretical interest. In practice, it doesn’t have to be exactly the one-third or the 38% cut you use. The important thing to remember is to place an attractive part of the image “about a third” into the frame. And why, you might ask? Like other tutorials, I could just tell you that it has been proven by the test of time. Used again and again for centuries, there’s got to be something about it. But I think it’s also important to explain that what it does, is that it places your subject in the scene in a way that opens up for a connection between the subject and the rest of the scene. It leaves a significant space on one side of the subject for the surroundings in stead of “cutting it up” into two separate parts, as when the subject is placed in the center. Understanding this, you can create a very harmonious visual relation between your main subject and it’s surroundings.

An important little note here at the end: What’s actually meant by “the main subject” and the most “attention-grabbing” part of your picture? Generally speaking, the human eye is mostly drawn to lighter areas, to parts with a high contrast and strong colors, particularly red, and to shapes that resembles the shape of the human body. If there’s a face in the photo, our eyes first move towards it’s eyes, attempting to make eye contact. So if any of these elements are in your image, those are the parts that are generally good to place in “the divine proportion”.

And finally, I’d like to note that, while it’s called a “rule”, photography is an art form that’s about more than just following a set of rules. This “rule” in particular has been broken again and again with superb results. In the larger scheme of things though, the “rules” work quite well, but they should be taken more as suggestions, especially useful to help beginners achieve interesting compositions.