I know a lot of you will be taking hundreds of photos in the upcoming week. Or, maybe you’ll be surprised with a brand new camera and go on a tear.

Here’s one simple tip for taking a more-interesting-than-would-be-otherwise photo: follow the rule of thirds.

In the rule of thirds, a photo is sectioned into thirds (vertical or horizontal or both). It is more pleasing to the eye when the subject of the photo appears on one of those lines. This is because people’s eyes tend to gravitate to those points, unconsciously. Interesting, right?

Here it is in effect.

This is my rather uninspiring, centered photo of Yoda. The colors are blah, the composition is blah, whatever. Let’s see what the rule of thirds can do with it.

But, actually, I took the photo with Yoda already positioned along a vertical third of the photo. Most cameras offer a grid to help you align things in thirds, which you should use. The subject of your photo should be aligned somewhere along those thirds lines (unless you are going for a very precise/centered photo). Even if you don’t shoot the photo with the rule of thirds in mind, you can always fix the image later when you edit/crop it.

 

 

Here, you see where the lines fall when I slice the image up in thirds.

 

 

Here is what it’d looked like if I had positioned Yoda too far to the right. Just kind of awkward, right?

 

Oh, and I always add more space in the direction of a person’s gaze. Look how uncomfortable the image gets if I added space to the wrong side of the photo.

 

 

ICK.

Now, if I centered Yoda, it’d be a totally boring photo. Well, worse than it already is anyway.

 

 

 

So, in the uncropped image, Yoda already appears on the third vertical line. But, since Yoda is a living thing with eyeballs, the photo would be more attractive if his eyes were aligned with the top horizontal line. (People naturally look first at a person’s eyes in a photo.) I’m going to crop the photo so that Yoda’s eyes line up along that top horizontal line.

 

 

See, we’re kind of getting somewhere, right? (Now that I’ve shown you this trick, I promise that you will not be able to look at another person interviewed on TV without noticing that their eyes are always aligned with that top horizontal line.)

The problem, though, is that after I cropped the photo to fix Yoda’s eye position, his body position is no longer centered around that vertical third line. Let’s fix that.

 

 

And there you go. A kind of uninspiring photo went somewhere slightly more interesting. What do you think?

 

 

Like all things in the arts, this is a rule worth breaking sometimes. But, it’s a simple little tip for getting a nice photo, on the fly.