Breaking the Rule of Thirds

Usually you want to take a picture using the rule of thirds. This picture is cropped using the rule of thirds.

If you drew a vertical line across every third of this frame, you'd find that the first vertical line would go right through the elephant.
I planned it that way. I placed the elephant following the Rule of Thirds.

The Rule of Thirds is a great way to plan your shots. Take for example, a landscape of the countryside just outside your city or town. You'd want to frame the picture so that the bottom two-thirds of your frame would be land and the top third sky. In this case the lines you drew across the frame to divide it into thirds would have been horizontal.

So much for the rule of thirds. Sometimes you can throw it out as in the picture above. If you've got a knock-off-your-socks photograph of a sunset that looks like fire, capture as much as you can in the frame. All the land you'll need is a bit more than an eighth of a frame so viewers will have a land reference with respect to the sky.

Sample Photo Critique

Sample Photo Critique (of my own photo).

Matt, great setting here, the curves make this an especially interesting photo. There's a lot going on here--two mini stories, actually--1. A man taking a photo and 2. A toddler playing with the water in the fountain.

It's too bad the man is partway out of the frame and that the girl isn't placed in about the left third of the photograph.

I cropped her to reposition her in this way, and, in the process, changed this photo from a landscape to traditional (for printing).

The only problem is I've cut out a lot of the photo, so that what's left will have less resolution.

Here's what I came up with: