 So did you know that there is one rule of composition that can really make a huge difference in the photographs that you take? It's called the rule of thirds, and we're going to talk about it in this lesson for the next few minutes. So I would listen up and check it out because it's one of the most important things you might learn in this course. The rule of thirds basically just asks you to divide your images up into three pieces on both the horizontal and the vertical axes. So here you can see me doing this to my favorite photo as of the last few months. This is my grandmother in her kitchen. And the rule of thirds is probably one of the things that I was thinking of most sort of in the back of my mind when I was taking this image. And it's one that I think of a lot when I'm shooting. The rule of thirds says that it's really great to put your subjects and different parts of your composition on these lines, on these third lines that you build. So imagine you fold your image into three pieces and you create these one, two, three little panels in both directions and one, two, three in this direction as well. And then you can take that line and say, okay, I have an important here. I have this sort of leading line in the background. It's called a leading line when you've got sort of a line through your image. I'll put that on this lower third here, so on this axis that you see down at the bottom. And then I've got my grandma smiling face here. She was so mad at me because I was taking pictures of her with her curlers in. And I put her face right there on the other one. If it was a really close-up image, maybe I would put her eyes on there or something like that. But no, I put her face and she is standing then on this line right here, which is one of our thirds. And over here on this other third, I kind of had this other leading line that was this countertop. And then it went led down to this bright spot, which is always nice to have a bright spot sort of near one of your rules of thirds, sort of intersections there. And then the s'mores that she was making for my cousin's wedding are right there. So this is how the rule of thirds works. And the rule of thirds works for lots of different images. How about we kind of line two images up next to each other right now. You can see here that this image to the left is not sticking to the rule of thirds. The lines are kind of maybe like right here. And then on this one it's about right here. And our vertical line goes something like this right here. And in this image you can see one of the really great things about the rule of thirds is it's good for landscapes. You can see when you put the horizon on this lower third line, you get a really nice landscape. And when you put this piece of sort of jagged, this sort of important piece of your composition, sort of a tall piece of this, I would almost say is the subject of the image, you put it on that third and it looks pretty nice. And you actually also have this very nice, when you put this rock on the left third, you see that you've kind of got this nice spoke action from the clouds up top, which here it looks a little bit, there's a little bit of a conflict here. And you're also, when you look at this image, not exactly sure where to look because you look right at the middle and then your eye kind of is not really sure where to go after that. You also sort of have this awkward distance here. This proportion of the sky to the ground is also a little awkward. So here in this image they've done it all right and I would say they did a pretty good job. And somewhere in between these two images I would say is maybe a better image. But this is borrowed from some really great person on Wikipedia who volunteered their images for this project. So that's really great. Now here you can see I just put a very boring image that I took recently. I was on a bike ride through the city and I kind of like this. I love my bike here. I'm a big biker and so I, and you can see that I love it so much that it's falling apart. But you can just see in this image all the only reason I put this on is because it's just a snapshot with my cell phone camera. And you can see that I've kind of used the rule of thirds here to make what is essentially a really boring photo a little bit more interesting. It's still not a very good photo, but it kind of just is me loving my bike and loving it by taking photographs of it, which is how I love many of the things in my life. And so you can see here that I've kind of used this line right here as one of my thirds and a lot of times I notice on my own lines I often draw them out a little bit further to the edge than maybe the traditional sort of rule and state. I often like to put things a little bit outside of the root of the third or maybe a little inside the third, but not necessarily precisely on it sometimes. But here you can kind of see I've got these people here which offsets the weight of the image and a lot of this is about weight. And then we've got over here this kind of heavy line that goes through. Again we have another line right here that's being kind of uncovered by this upper third. And so it gives the image a nice sort of comfortable balanced feeling where you can imagine if I were to put this here, not only would the lines be intersecting at the bike seat, but it would just maybe feel a little bit empty in the middle or something like that. So you can see how you can use the real rule of thirds in a little bit in a way to kind of make boring images more exciting. That's kind of one thing that we photographers have to do sometimes. Here you can see a couple more images that I've taken recently. I just wanted to kind of compare the horizons thing that we were talking about just a little bit ago. You can see here I put my friend Rebecca, we were hiking in Germany here. We were hiking in the mountains and I put her on one of the thirds. I said, okay, she's right there. I wanted her head actually even on the third because I thought that was kind of important. And you can see up at the landscape on the lower third. And then I kind of used this tree and kind of used that to fill up another that one third over here. And that kind of makes a nice balanced image. If this was empty, it might feel it might be a better picture or it might be a worse picture. But I kind of liked it with the tree and I didn't have much option with sort of cutting it down. It wasn't much option other than getting closer. And then here you can see that I've put the landscape. I will put the concentration on this field here. I wanted to get this sort of flowering field of I think it's called canola in English down here at the bottom. And I kind of just wanted the sky. The sky was going to be overexposed and overcast anyway. So I just wanted to concentrate on the flowers. So you can see I kind of pushed that up to the top third. And that's what they say. They say to put landscape the horizon line on the bottom or the top third. And that will give you stronger images. And in that case, you also just want to choose which one is more important for you. In this picture, Rebecca was more important. So I put her up above. I kind of got her off of the background, put her up here on the sky so you could really see her. And on this image, I really wanted to emphasize the flower. So I tilted the camera down. And that is what composition is all about. Composition equals emphasis. Emphasis is the key to taking strong images. You want to know what your subject is. You want to know what you're photographing. And then use your composition as a tool to achieve that. And this is an image that I took just the other day when I was riding my bike to work one day. And I thought, wow, hey, it's a really beautiful morning. I should document this just like I probably say just about every day. And I've got a little bit higher than a third here. You can actually see I kind of overshot my third on the top here. Let's try this again. So my thirds would probably be right about here and here. And then I've got another third here and here. And I've put my shadow. So this is me riding my trusty bike. You all know how much I love my bike now. And put myself down here on the bottom third. And then I kind of used the top. And I didn't really want a lot of sky. I just wanted lots of cement. And mostly it was about this shadow that I wanted to capture in the sort of the direction of the images up and to the left. And so I kind of wanted to capture all of that. But you can see I kind of sort of stuck to the rule of thirds just on a corner of my image. And not necessarily in the whole thing, which can work as well. So again, not the most groundbreaking image. But it's just something that I took the other day and thought, hey, well, kind of a rule of thirds image. Here you can see an image that is a little bit older and also maybe doesn't look necessarily like directly a rule of thirds sort of situation. But it kind of is. Now usually I don't shoot crooked images and you'll hear me complain about that in lots of these videos. But sometimes I do. Sometimes it happens. And here you can see that I took an image of some people walking. Not too far from where I took the picture of the bike with the other people in the rule of thirds a while back. This picture was taken actually I think on the same day. And here you can see that I have used the rule of thirds to sort of divide up the subject. So I have a subject on one third and a subject on the other third. And in this case they are shadows, but they could also be people. And you can see that I have sort of stuck them all in those places. And there's not, although there's not a lot happening down here in the lower third. You can see I also kind of put all the conflict points where all the lines and everything are hitting sort of on the thirds. Which is another way to use it. You can use just two of them if you want or one of them or you can use all of them. It depends on what you have in front of you and what you want to do with it. Now again we are on our hiking trip. This was the day that I took the photo of Rebecca on the rocks. But now we are looking at the map and I think this is actually a couple hours later. We're in a restaurant trying to figure out where we are going from here. And you can see here that we have got another rule of thirds sort of situation going on here. We put Christopher right here on the corner of this third. And we've got his hand right here and sort of divided out. We've taken the map and put it on this lower third. We've taken sort of the building and everything else and put it on this other third. And the one thing that I would really change about this image is just this right here. Which is just sort of lazy photographer. I wish that I would have figured out a way to either get rid of or include this arm, Rebecca's arm in the image. And sometimes rules are meant to be broken. You can see here that I have broken the rule of thirds. You can see I put the one, I put the part of the sign on the third. But that was mostly coincidental. And I have placed my subject in the very middle of the image. Usually you're kind of aiming for these corners, these intersection points, is where you're trying to put your subjects. But in this image it just didn't make sense and I kind of thought, you know I just really like this, I really like the stone sign. And I thought okay well then I'll just put it right in the middle. And I think it works, it's not, again not the most exciting and amazing image in the world. But it also just kind of captures a memory in a way that I think is somewhat visually appealing. So you can, you know, take this rule with a grain of salt. It's there to be used but not abused. Alright, so that was our lesson about the rule of thirds. Come on back and check out more videos here at AllPercy.org.