Birmingham Photographer | Photo Tip Friday

This is going to be a rule in composition. Composition is like the genetetic makeup of a photograph. Its what goes where and more often than not, there is a reason why I put things in a certain place in the frame. I know some people wonder why so many of my pictures are cropped off-center, and sometimes even chop through body parts. Here's why. The rule of thirds tells us that you should place an imaginary tic-tac-toe board on top of a picture like this.



Your area of focus should fall on one of the inner or outer 1/3 of the intersecting points on the grid. In a more close up image, your area of focus (the eyes, since that is always the focus of a subject) should fall at the intersecting point, or close to it. Your image when following the rule of thirds should look something like this.



You see that this striking senior is completely in the far left column in the grid. He is off center and the area of focus is directly on him. The remaining space in the center and right of the image is called negative space. Negative space forces us to look exactly where we need to be looking. So, Caleb's image was proofed like this.


What if I hadn't followed the rule of thirds when cropping? He would have ended up with a proof that looks like this.



Unless you are being towed for not noticing that sign, you probably don't care about it and that shouldn't have been where your focus first landed. I'll bet you $100.00 that you looked at that first. That's because it was in the area that gets noticed first.

You can adjust the composition of a photo in post processing very easily. If you have Photoshop, or even Picasa or some other photo editing software, use the crop tool and play around with your images and see how you like it. Happy cropping!