hey everybody welcome back to another episode of The Art of Photography my name is Ted Forbes and today we're talking about rule of thirds we're continuing on in the composition series that we're doing here and uh last time we talked about rule of odds and one of the things I think you're going to start to see or one of the things I really hope you're starting to see is a little bit of crossover between some of these Concepts um especially the earlier ones where we were talking about line and shape and how those are going to kind of come into play with some of the more conceptual ideas that we're talking about today like we talked about rule of space before and Rule of thirds now or excuse me we talked about the rule of odds now we're talking about the rule of thirds rule of space will come next and these again like I said they're guidelines okay so it's really important to understand that they're not rules as in that every shot you do has to fall Within These parameters they're decisions that you make once you've learned them once you've practiced them once you get an understanding of the look and feel that they're going to give you when and is the appropriate time to use them and maybe when is not the appropriate time to use them so anyway having said all that let's talk about rule of thirds today we have talked about rule of thirds on this on this podcast before but it's been several years and you're certainly welcome to go back it's an earlier episode I'll put a link to it in the show notes and this is a little bit of a review from that um and maybe but put into the context of what we're doing with the composition stuff and with our composition blog which if you haven't seen it is composition study.com go check it out um but the rule of thirds is this basically we've talked about in here in some of these episodes about figure ground relationships and if you don't remember what that is or this is the first episode you're watching the ground is simply the canvas or the area of your picture okay so it's whatever you're going to put in that picture um I like to think of it as maybe a canvas if you're a painter because that makes more sense because it's hard to to find just the two-dimensional space like of a JPEG but that it's that area that's the ground figure is what you put onto that ground so it could be your subject it could be maybe some texture it could be objects whatever that is and so figure ground relationships are very important if you take the ground and we're going to I'm going to get on the computer and I'll show you exactly I'll draw this out if you if you look at your ground and you divide it into thirds okay so you're starting to see some of these concepts of you know balance equating to the number three if you divide it into three sections evenly so you draw two lines to divide it into three parts vertically and horizontally both you you go up and down and then you go left and right what you're going to do is you're going to have these cross points and what those become are points of interest in the composition uh you don't actually see the lines or these cross points they're not actually in the composition but if you mentally imply those and place your subjects on those points and try to play with that it's going to create a little more balance and a little more interest in your composition in general um I look a lot at the work of hre CER Bron for this because I think he's such a classicist in the way that he makes these things happen I think he's so good at taking this classical view of composition and just really doing a lot with it and putting his own voice his own stamp on it which is exactly what he did and that's his style of composition it's very classically based the other fascinating thing that I think there is about Bron is that you know he did a lot of street photography so sometimes he probably would set things up but a lot of it was improvised but the reason he was so good at it is these Concepts were in his mind he was trained this way and he had enough practice and shot millions of pictures to the point where he had a really natural feel for a lot of these rules of composition but they weren't rules that were just ingrained in his mind and very naturally flow flowed between what he was seeing and where to be where to move the camera maybe wait for the subject to move into the right position he was just so gifted at that so let's go over to the computer and we're going to take a look at some of the rule of thirds examples here in this first image that I want to look at this is uh W Eugene Smith from uh mid1 1960s it's a portrait of a nun or a photo of a nun and there's a lot of things going on in this image other than what we're going to talk today which is Rule thirds but what I want to do just a second is look at this image and I hope you guys are starting to see this you know we've done several shows in a series on composition techniques now and I I hope that you're starting to see that a lot of times you're more than one concept we've talked about is present in any given image and I think that's important and the reason is is you know I think that's all these are tools that basically at your disposal and as a photographer you know or as an artist the decisions that you make around you know whether it's a rule concept or if it's just a use of line or shape or or something that's you know contrast something else we've talked about it's it's blending these together that create interest often times in a composition and there's several things that you can see that are going on in this picture that I think are really worth noting it's an outstanding photo um also the fact that you know this this is a street type photo it looks um very unposed very improvised very off the cuff you know when you see guys like w Jane Smith or C bran I mean this is what blows my mind and I've said this before on the show that that you know their sensibility to use a lot of these comp compositional techniques on kind of a subconscious level because they don't have the time when you're composing Street photos uh to sit there and over plan your composition so it's a really natural ability to employ a lot of these techniques and Concepts we've talked about and they do it very naturally um they were very both very gifted photographers in that regard and it's something that you know when we study these it's one thing to set these up in a studio you know figure it out beforehand it's another thing to be able to improvise and and get a lot of this stuff going on um we've talked about obviously the use of shape and the use of line and as far as shape goes you know obviously what's prominent is we'll talk about subf framing in another another episode here but you have you know obviously the Habit in this outfit that none wears that really naturally frames that up just with some contrast and simple shapes the way the white part frames up her face and which is framed also by the black part of the habit um it's amazing I think the shape of her hand is really important in this uh you know and as far as the background goes this isn't exactly complete negative space but I would call it negative space you can tell that there's a crowd of people back there but there's a lowlevel or low enough level of detail to where it's really not distracting even the figure you make out the most right behind the nun does not distract from the picture and so it's it's uh it is definitely I think negative space in that regard and and it's not completely negative but it's certainly low energy um and it does not distract from you know and it's dark enough too to where you know the white part of the Habit really makes her stand out and pop the other thing that's really interesting about this um that and you probably picked right up on it when you first saw the image is where her eyes are directed um they're looking up they're looking slightly to her left um to our right and what's interesting is there is an implied line or an implied Direction um directional sense with this composition and that's what's important uh we've talked about it before and I had lot of questions back where people didn't really understand what implied line meant well this isn't exactly a hard line that's implied but it certainly you could you know if her eyes were shooting Beams I know that's really kind of a stupid way of looking at it but that's what it is you get a sense of direction that there's something that she's looking at that's above and behind you and the fact that it's a nun uh you know there's certainly an implication of some kind of spiritual or religious um Direction the way her hand is placed over her mouth and and maybe amazement or something like that anyway I'm over analyzing it at this point but anyway what I want you to get out of this is a way a lot of the techniques we've talked about so far are starting to all come together Within These compositions that we're looking at and I hope that you're starting to see this with photographers that you like to see and that stuff that you find that's of interest is that you you start to see how these concepts are used how they work together to make the picture so how does this work with with rule of thirds okay so rule of thirds we talked about on here before and so basically if I subdivide horizontally my composition into three sections so essentially you have two lines that make that so you can see there's three shapes three parts two lines so I've divided that into three and then also divide um um vertically by three so both directions you're going to get a grid you're going to get a um cross-section of nine spaces here and within those nine spaces what we're looking at actually is where the lines cross and and we have specifically four points of interest see where all these cross-sections are there's four of them those are generally in the in the concept of rule of thirds those are defined as your key points of interest um they're points of high energy this is where you can create impact in a composition I'm going to also argue because we're so used to seeing the rule of thirds uh used in graphic design and illustration and painting and photography um it's a very common technique to see people use I think that what it ends up doing to People of Our Generation looking at this is it really creates a sense of balance very easily I think that if you want to get a sense of energy and contrast going I would actually choose personally not to do something with rule thirds to create that energy but that's how it's classically defined but it does create a sense of balance now the thing is is you don't have to use all four of these points in fact I wouldn't sometimes it's easy enough to just use one point of interest and you pick any of the four um sometimes it's easy or sometimes it's nice to see things where you contrast so like you know you have one of the uh the higher points and one of the lower points down here that together combine you see this some brace solence work a lot um combined to create interest and balance in the photographs so anyway so basically if I take away the black background you can see that in this composition uh the nun's left eye was what was placed on that point of interest and that's really important here because that's really what it's a point that defines the composition in some ways um but it's definitely sitting on a point of interest if she was moved towards the center of the image this may not have the same impact in fact I would argue that it wouldn't and I think there's a number of reasons for that and it's not just cuz it would expose this guy back here it's just it would it creates more balance in a symmetry kind of way of looking at things but not uh balance in terms of thirds like we've looked at before and remember the rule of odds this kind of plays with that a little bit and we've talked about that in the last couple shows too so moving over to Pinterest now um in in case you guys aren't aware uh one of the things I'm doing on these is on my Pinterest account I'm trying to do all my research online so I can share that with you guys in advance so you can kind of go into my collection of boards on Pinterest and you can find whatever the next show is going to be or what whatever you haven't seen yet and kind of be able to track this as we go along so you can see these images in advance if you like um but anyway I want to go through and I want to talk about rule of thirds we looked at the uh the W genene Smith image um I'm not in Photoshop now so I'm not going to draw lines for you but I think based on the last example you understand that and you need to start mentally being able to process where these lines are and where those points of interest occur I think it's fairly obvious in here that it's on the upper right point of Interest so if you were excuse me were to divide this image vertically and horizontally you would have cross ing right here where this this um wonderful image of a Russian woman where her head is placed um on the image what's also interesting is you're starting to see we haven't covered the geometry techniques yet but uh there's a major triangle that's kind of floating off that's formed by these two benches That You Don't See entirely and we're going to cover um geometric Concepts pretty soon too in the compositional series but anyway there's several things that make this such a a beautiful image a couple other things I want to show you um some stuff that's very conventional another brison I love this guy with his head on the table and you can see the bald head obviously is right on one of those points of interest um anyway very quirky very Whimsical but wonderful image U this is Arnold Newman another one of my favorite photographers this is a portrait of Eugene Smith um that he made the man who shot the nun photo we just looking at and I love it because first of all he's such a wonderful character to look at with the hair and the beard and the the glasses and and also and Newman did this a lot is to put the point of interest on one of the lower corners and uh you know you can see it's pretty much kind of right near his eye right here if you were to subdivide and create those points of interest on this image and so if you don't understand what I'm talking about cuz I'm not drawing them on these images because I want you to start seeing them mentally you know rewind this and watch how we subdivide it again so you can see where those points are I think that's really important um to know um this is imagene Cunningham a portrait of anel Adams you can see almost a square format probably shot on a hustel blood something of that nature you can see that um the head is placed relatively near one of those points of interest it's not exactly on it and I think this is an important point to make as well because you don't always have to be so rigid with it and I'll get into that in a couple images in just a second um another famous image this is let's look at the final verse this is the public excuse me the Pablo Picasso portrait that Arnold Newman did in the 50s and you can see that the left eye creates a sense of mystery because of the Shadow excuse me his right eye and uh it is placed on one of those points of interest what's interesting about this shot and I couldn't find a bigger image online of this but this is actually the original this was a pretty tight crop of the original large format portrait you could see even in the original portrait he had placed Picasso's head on one of those points of interest but I think he found oh probably because Picasso was a Cubist um to box that in a lot tighter just made sense it made a better portrait and it spoke more of the type of artist that Picasso was so I think it's really interesting and a lot of a lot of the um contact sheets that that nman had marked up are available in various books and stuff that you can you can see um another classic one this is C Bon um obviously the head of the speaker right on a point of Interest also you see um some pretty elaborate symmetry um perspective Etc going on with with this crowd that's watching him so this is a great image it would have had a completely different feel had the speaker been right in the middle of the shot it still would have been interesting but I would argue that it's almost it's almost too symmetrical at that point and I think offsetting that a little bit just creates a little more interest a little more depth a little more um you know maybe more balance in that composition than you would have if everything were straight on now a couple of these images I want to show you this one this is um the famous surrealist painter MOX Ernst and this was another Arnold Newman portrait and you can see that the head or mox's face and he's smoking so there's smoke everywhere it's not right exactly on one of those points of interest in the rule of thirds and this is a technique that you see sometimes where it's almost like it's too rigid of a composition just to follow straight up rule of thirds so a lot of times you can pull your subject just off of it a little bit you can tell that that point would probably be right here where this black part is and just moving his head down a little bit just creates a slight bit of depth a slight less obvious nature to it and I think that's really important um you also see that in well here's an anel Adams picture this is um Autumn Moon from High Sierra and notice how the Moon is actually set off of that point just a little bit the actual point would probably be somewhere up in here and I think that's important when it's too obvious sometimes just pulling it slightly off axis just a little bit um creates a little more um well it takes away the obvious and it creates a little more balance and a little more interest to it um you know maybe a little more energy to that composition and then finally the famous JFK portrait that Arnold Newman did I think this image because you have such a strong perspective that's coming in from the way the building is towering down and the angle this is shot at and the the the wide angle the lens and JFK's proportion to that I don't think that Kennedy if You' placed his head right on the rule of thirds in this image with this angle it just seems to flow naturally even though it's pretty close and I think that probably a lot of those implied lines from the perspective nature of this from the the way the roof hangs down the way the window lines go um that creates a nature to this composition that they kind of Point all at that point of interest and I I don't know I just think it was this was a good decision to bring him down plus as we've talked about before when you have subject ground relationships you generally will call more attention to a subject one it's contrasty his dark suit his there's not a lot of light on his face he's actually back lit and two um he's close to the edge and close to a corner actually and so that's drawing those two elements are drawing a lot of attention to Kennedy and because the proportion of him in proportion of this building is he's pretty small you almost need to bring a little more more attention to him so anyway that's been rule thirds and I think it's really important for you guys to start looking for this in images that you like um one more I can show you real quick this is Fay dunway and Steve McQueen this is a Bill Ray image that was shot and again I one of the things that I like that he's playing with too are kind of oh the convex concave shapes the way their faces join together there's a kind of a a flirtatious not even flirtatious is almost erotic nature of the Dynamics between the two of them but these shapes all kind of come together right on a point of interest and I think that's important he didn't put their heads on a point of Interest he took a shape that kind of is a notch deer that you got to look for put that on a point of Interest thus making it more obvious and I think that's important but it's really important to look at this stuff in context of the the images that you like to look at um and start to see these through the camera lens when you're taking pictures um it's really pretty easy to start to get a feel for rule of thirds it's a little less easy to start getting a feel with how to make decisions based on like do you pull something right off of that point of Interest a little bit well in the case of the Moon image probably yes because there's nothing else there and it becomes a little too obvious when it's right on a point or is it for a reason like this JFK image where you need a little more subject attention than what's going to be given just by the rule thirds rule thirds probably would have Blended this a little too much so anyway um hit me up on Facebook Twitter follow me on Pinterest if you want to keep track of this stuff and uh that's about it for this time so we will see you guys in the next episode thanks for watching