The rule of third will change your photography!

Here is the thing that helps me to improve the most my photography style !!

Indeed it looks strange to say that but what impacted the most my photography was to discover this rule of third. So let’s deep dive into it together.

Everything start by mentally ( or virtually through the setting of you Camera of your phone ) dividing your image in 9 squares exactly like this :

And then you will use this line to position your subject and bring the point of attention for the viewers exactly here.

To be honest this rule was pretty counterintuitive for me… when you have been trained from your first age to center everything in a picture it looks totally weird to start to use this rule…

Another way to use it which is quite common is when we have an horizon line. And the good point about using one of those 2 horizontal line to position your horizon is that first it will help you to be straitght 😅 but more importantly it will force you to make a choice !!
Indeed even when you just have a sky and a sea you’d better make a choice to have a dominance that stand out. Let me show you another example here :

Tell me in the comments if you have the same feeling but the first picture is relatively boring and a bit banale despite the very nice sea, path, sky and model. In the second one, using the rule of third you give a perspective to the picture, you immediately see that we put emphasis on the stone path and it naturally lead to the subject who is also positioned using this rule of third.

Let me show you few other examples where I used the rule of third to highlight my subject and also give the right volume of context for him / her :

Here the rule of third help to valorise the subject but also give much more context on what she is looking at

Here it helps to really give the impression that the woman is entering in your scene.

I think you now got the point !! Use as much as you can this rule of third to guide your viewer, make some choices and put emphasis on some part of the picture to tell your story.

The very nice trick with this rule is that you can absolutely use it in post edition by cropping to reposition you subject, your horizon, etc……

And naturally like for any rule in photography it is there also to be not followed sometimes … Again depending on the story you want to tell ☺️

Tell me un the comments. How do you use this rule of third ?

As you can see I decided here to go and shoot with one of my other lens. I wanted to shot portraits or people and wanted to be closer to people being at 105mm. This lens having a fix and relatively big aperture (f4) you can have a good subject detachment and a good background blur. ( NB: the longer your focal is the more blurred your background will be with the same aperture).

That said this new shooting session made also clear for me that I want to go for more extreme lens 😅 I will definitely go for the RF 70-200mm f2.8. Cannot wait to jump into the temptation with this one 🤗🤗🤗🤗