Rule of Thirds

It’s been challenging for us to determine where next to go with our blog, but after a few weeks of thought, we’ve put together a list of topics that we’d like to discuss before moving into the technical how to’s in Photoshop.

1: Composition – rule of thirds
2: Controlling motion – shutter speed
3: Controlling distractions – depth of field and background distractions
4: Natural lighting.

First, visit this web site then come back and we can discuss the rule of thirds, and how to apply it using your camera.

http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/rule-of-thirds/

Depending on the camera you have, you might have a menu option that allows you to turn on a grid that displays in your viewfinder or LCD screen to help you follow the rule of thirds. On a Nikon D70 or D200, this option is called “Grid”. If you don’t have this option, don’t despair. You can “eyeball it” or as the article states, apply it in post processing if you are shooting digital.

One question that often comes up is “Do you always have to use the rule of thirds?”. The answer is no. Many still images, especially those that are used for advertisement don’t use the rule of thirds. Their product is centered on the frame. When should you use the rule of thirds ? It’s really up to the images that you are taking, but in general one can apply the rule of thirds in about 90% of the images that are taken.

Take a look again at the image of the bee on the link above. If we were taking that image, the first thing we would have done is turned the camera 90 degrees. The flow of the image is longer than it is wider (if that makes sense). We would have placed the bee on the left grid line, and tried to keep the left edge of flower on or slightly right of the right grid line (or as close as we could have). The image as it’s taken here, appears to have the bee dead center. Another option would be to simply crop the image so that some of the green space behind the bee would be removed so the bee didn’t appear to be “targeted”.

One question that you may be asking is how you accomplish this with your camera. Depending on your camera, you may have selectable focus points on the grid lines, and even the intersect points. If you don’t, there is a simple answer in most cases. Simply focus on your subject using the center focus area. Once the camera has focused, keep holding the shutter release button (don’t press it to capture the image yet), turn the camera slightly to reposition the image in the viewfinder, then press the shutter release button to capture the image.

Personally, we try to follow the rule of thirds when capturing the image versus in post processing. Why ? Quite simply, more processing time equates to less time to spend doing other things, whether that’s sharing your images with friends and family, or capturing more images. One thing that you will probably hear us preach often is to capture the image correctly the first time. So many amateurs think “ I’ll fix it in Photoshop later”. Let us tell you from personal experience, that is not the right attitude.

Imagine that you are taking pictures of your child’s 1st birthday party. You’re inside, near a window, the sun is brightly shinning in and you using your new camera in Auto mode. As you are taking pictures, every so often you have a moment to look at them on the small LCD and they look OK to you, but could be better…no worries….you’ll tweak them in Photoshop later. Now, the party is over, and you have loaded them to you PC. You find that the pictures of the kid’s faces closest to the window are too dark, and everything behind them is blown out to white (no details). Those that are sitting farther away are fine, but everything behind them is too dark. You smugly say, I can fix this using Photoshop…well, yes you may be able to…but figure an average of 1 hour per image and that you need a fairly high level of skill using Photoshop to do so. The brightness/contrast sliders aren’t going to fix these images. It’s going to take the use of layers, layer masks, and a lot of manipulation. By the way, the white blown out areas…you can’t do anything to fix that area. There’s no information there…it’s been “blown out” (we’ll talk about this later when we talk about histograms). Bottom line, assume you can’t fix it and take it right the first time. To quote Sean Connery in the movie The Untouchables, “Here endith the lesson”.

In case you were wondering, yes, you can fix the lighting so that the images turn out well. If anyone needs to know now, post a comment to the blog and we’ll answer. Otherwise, we’ll address the problem when we get to natural lighting. By the way, the link above is a great resource. We recommend signing up for their weekly newsletters.