Jason Anderson (Canon Blogger) has posted a most excellent article titled “The Rule of Thirds Revisited“. A bit of a review for all the newbs out there who aren’t up on their photography terms.
The rule of thirds is a compositional rule of thumb in visual arts such as painting, photography and design. The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. – wikipedia
In the blog post Jason discusses the finer points of the rule and discusses different interpretations including using lines vs hot spot composition (his own term) and in the end leaves the reader with a final paragraph packed full of questions. So what do you think? Is Jason completely off his rocker or is there merit to his interpretation of this well established visual approach to photography?
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4 Comments at "A New Twist on Rule of Thirds"
It is always good to revisit the basics of composition upon which most of us based our coverage.
I’ll fess-up to it: I probably lean on this compositional cliche more often than I should.
But when you’ve got thousands of images to cull through and then hundreds to put in an album, it’s far too easy to hold the command-key down in Aperture while cropping!
No disrespect to Jason as it’s a fine article, and I’m an avid reader – but “a new twist” – errm no…..
Don’t know why it took WordPress this long to show me that you had linked to my blog post on this subject, but thought I’d take a moment to stop in and say “thanks”!
To Alan specifically, the twist was that instead of just using the ROT for composition, I’ve noticed that landscape composition uses the lines more than the hotspots, and that portraiture uses the hotspots more than the lines…thought that was kind of interesting…
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