Know the Rules, Then Break Them

Photographers love to make rules about how a good image should look. Then of course they say with superiority how you really shouldn’t follow all those rules of convention anyway. Today, I thought I’d write, in a bit of detail, about one of the most hallowed of photographic laws. It is known as “The Rule of Thirds”.

The premise is straightforward: the subject of an image should fall on the lines that divide the frame in thirds. Like so:


Following this rule generally creates pleasing images. Subjects placed in the center of the frame often look unbalanced. Today, I thought I’d take a few images from a recent trip to Big Bend National Park as some examples of how this works: The first shot is a pleasant desert landscape that adheres closely to the rule of thirds:


Now let’s drop some third lines across the image so you can see what I mean.


Notice how the agave plant in the foreground falls almost exactly at the meeting point of two, thirds lines and the top of the mountain on the upper left is just about meeting the top third line. The peak on the upper right and the plant play off each other nicely. This makes a nice well-balanced composition.

The next two shots are birds. Now at some point, I’ll probably do another post on my thoughts on bird photography in particular but in the mean time, lets stick to these two images. Both follow the rule of thirds. The first is a horizontal image of a male Western Bluebird:


Below you can see here how the third lines bisect right through the bird. This composition is typical but effective in the situation where the subject is too distant to provide a frame filling image. Also note the way the bird looks into the frame and the way it's downward tilting bill emphasizes the angle of the branch.


The next is a vertical image and the same rules apply here as well. This one is an Acorn Woodpecker foraging up the side of a dead tree:


And with the third lines in place, the lines hit very close to the bird’s eye, which is usually the focal point of a wildlife shot.


Next we start to bend the rules a bit. Panoramic images already disrupt the familiar rectangular format. They spread across a horizontal (or rarely vertical) plane to expand the view. It creates the sense of an expanded horizon, and occasionally this is the case when multiple images are stitched together. However, often panoramics are simply regular photos cropped to fit the format, as is this image of the Chisos Mountains:


I chose the format to emphasize the length of the rainbow and the similar shape of the mountains dropping into the surrounding desert. Now when I throw a thirds grid over this image, stretched to fit, you can see how the same rule of thirds actually applies in this format as well.


The mountain top hits the top line and the rainbow bends through the top line twice, while the horizon line angles left more or less along the lower third.

As with any rule however, the rule of thirds can, and should, be broken. This is becoming particularly true in advertising and fashion imagery. Look through the New York Times Magazine fashion section on any given Sunday and you’ll see the rule of thirds thrown out the window on almost every image. Because the rule of thirds is so often used, the “recipe” is familiar and to push boundaries it must be broken. This works well with advertising products that are also trying to push boundaries. It makes an important statement when the style of clothes and style of photos combine. Landscape photography is not at the cutting edge of photographic art. We, meaning the general photographic audience, still like classic landscapes. Pushing the conventional boundaries (sweet light, saturated colors, complimentary lines) does not yet happen on a regular basis. Now that isn’t to say the rules are never broken, but the situation must warrant it, unlike fashion photography where the rules are broken on principle. One example of a situation warranting a break with convention is the image below. In this image I wanted to emphasize the mosaic of clouds while still providing enough of the landscape. Here I was trying to demonstrate the sense of space that dominates the desert of Big Bend. I like this image quite a bit, but notably it wasn’t among those from my Big Bend series recently selected by an editor for publication in a photo magazine.


And here I’ve taken the same image and dropped a grid over it. You can see how the horizon line falls substantially below the 1/3 line:


The moral of the story is this: Just like legislative laws, know the rules, they exist for a reason, but don’t follow them blindly, constantly question why the exist and break them when you should.