Breaking the Rules – Day 2: Balancing
As I said yesterday, there are certain “rules” of photography to adhere to, unless you purposefully want to BREAK THE RULES! The thing about breaking rules, in any discipline, is knowing what they are, first. Yesterday, I talked about the rule of thirds. Today, I’m going to discuss balancing.
A good photograph will be balanced. That is, if you are shooting along the left or right “third” gridline, you will want to make sure the photograph is balanced. If you have something on the left side, you will want to balance it out by making sure there is something on the right side, as well.
This photograph breaks that rule.
The subject is on the lower right, but there is nothing on the left. This is an unbalanced photograph. This was done purposefully, to break the rules! But a more “balanced” photograph would have something in the upper left portion of the photo – perhaps another child, a dog playing in the water, or a rock formation, to name a few.
-Tiffany
Breaking the Rules – Day 1: Rule of Thirds
I found this interesting photo competition hosted by National Geographic called, “Breaking the Rules” of conventional photography. Although all of the photos of National Geographic’s site are worth viewing, I was interested to see how “breaking the rules” brought forth photographs that just felt… different. Not bad, certainly. But you can tell there’s something different about them.
Not formally educated in photography myself, I was curious about these “rules.” I went looking for them on the internet, and quickly found many! I’m going to cover one rule per day, until I run out of suggestions. Here’s the first one.
RULE OF THIRDS: Imagine your photograph broken up into 9 equal parts, with two vertical lines and two horizontal lines. The “rule of thirds” says it’s optimal to put your subject along these lines or where they intersect. In the picture that I took in Yosemite, seen below, the photograph probably would have turned out better if I had taken it a tilted a little further down, capturing Half Dome in that upper-right intersection. But as it is, it looks pretty good.
The below photograph shows how well one can turn out if you hit one of the “sweet spot” intersections.
What would a photograph look like that had broken this rule? Maybe the subject or main focus would be in a corner or off to one side. Don’t forget to check out National Geographic’s site for their own examples! As soon as I find one of my own that breaks this rule (or I take one, if I can’t find one), then I will post it below.
Mountains Above Lakeside Near Barona Casino
David and I had a great day today. We walked through the gardens and around the pond near the Barona Casino in Lakeside, CA. That whole area is beautiful. Here are a few photographs for our trip.
Here, I was purposefully trying to make the foreground blurry while the lake was in focus. The two chairs reminded me of a nice place for me and my husband to sit and watch the ducks and water. Make the chairs blurry gives the feeling of being in the photograph, looking out over the pond.
I know duck photographs are a dime a dozen, but I just loved this pretty girl.
All in all, we had a great outing. I can’t wait to go out again!
-Tiffany
