Rule of Thirds -- when to break it?

[AlanKlein]

The compositional point of shooting however is EMPHASIS on the subject and there is NO emphasis on the subject in a perfectly balanced image.

The perfectly balanced picture is when you place the subject in the middle if there are no other elements, like a portraiture. Howewver, by placing the main subject in the middle when there are other elements in the shot, is that the other elements draw the eye away from the main subject into either the negative area or other area where other objects are located. By balancing the elements, you remove that effect. Plus the eye isn't fixed. It moves around through the whole picture. Then the brain assembles the photo into something that is not what the eye is seeing. Maybe balance sets off aesthetic enzymes or whatever in the brain. So in a way, a balanced picture where the subject is off center, creates a better emphasis on the main subject even though it's off center as long as other elements balance the composition.

I'm sorry, but after reading the above several times, it is as clear as mud. If the subject is off centre in accordance with the rule of thirds, then it is not a perfectly balanced image.

I never mentioned rule-of-thirds. I was talking about balance. I said that if the main subject is on one side, it should be balanced against something on the other side. Re-read the last sentence in my last post.

 

[somberg]

Turns out the golden mean, golden rectangle, rule of thirds, and so on are ALL basically folk nonsense.

The interesting thing is that you follow elements that our brains find aesthetically pleasing and seem to follow the rule of thirds or just plain balance in a picture. Our brains automtically place elements in a photo that are pleasing to our eyes. The rules aren't so much rules as they are descriptions of what our brain already finds pleasing. My understanding is that these explanations came long before photography and were described in painting.

That's exactly what I was asking about, Alan. Is there really any evidence that our brains find the rule of thirds to be aesthetically pleasing or is it just folk lore that has been passed along for ages. I suspect the latter.

 

[Benco]

Photographers worry about "where do I stick the subject?" Painters don't.

It depends what or how you paint, sure there's plenty of modern and contemporary artists who pretty much throw paint onto a canvas randomly but for more disciplined work composition is an important element and painters do indeed worry about it.

 

[amolitor]

Photographers worry about "where do I stick the subject?" Painters don't.

It depends what or how you paint, sure there's plenty of modern and contemporary artists who pretty much throw paint onto a canvas randomly but for more disciplined work composition is an important element and painters do indeed worry about it.

Not really, no, not in the sense that I mean. The painting is not divided up into "the subject" and "all that crud in the background, the stuff that's not the subject, oh bother what am I going to do about that". Photographers tend to think of the things in the frame as:

- the thing I am taking a picture of (the Subject)
- everything else

To a painter, the "subject" is everything in the frame. If it's not part of the subject of the painting, you simply don't put it in the frame. There may be a primary object of interest, say the sitter for a portrait, but the stuff in the frame around that sitter is generally designed to support that main object of interest. You can certainly say "well, the sitter is the subject" but there's no denying that whatever you call these things, there are two rather different points of view in play here. I have no wish to argue over what the word "subject" shall mean. Feel free to substitute "Fragnap" for my meaning of "subject" if you like. The rule of thirds then tells you were to place the Fragnap.

Painters do not see the problem of composition as one of "where shall I stick the primary interesting object", in general. The problem of composition is one of designing the entire frame, including most interesting object if any, and subordinate objects. Placement of subordinate objects and masses relative to the primary one, for instance, is a problem of great import to the painter, it's an actually important problem that needs to be solved to make a good picture. Things like the RoT, Golden Triangle, etc, sweep these kinds of actually important problems under the rug in favor of the relatively trivial "where shall I stick the subject".

Of course there are exceptions. There are probably painters who, perhaps, paint absolutely true to life, for whom "background" is synonymous with "stuff I have to deal with that isn't the main object" but these are the exception rather than the rule.

 

[somberg]

Very interesting ideas, amolitor. I need to think about that some, but it does make sense.

 

[AlanKlein]

Apparently, some "rules" predate photography and were used in painting: Rule of Thirds - Watercolorpainting.com (c) Greg Conley

In 1797, J.T. Smith wrote of the rule of thirds for landscape painting in his book "Remarks on Rural Scenery." He requires that 1/3 (one third) of the painting be reserved for land and water and the upper 2/3 (two thirds) are to be used for air and sky. The land and water bottom third is again divided into thirds, reserving the lower 1/3 (one-third) for land and the remaining 2/3 (two thirds) for water. J.T. "Antiquity" Smith was a contemporary of English watercolourist John Constable (1776-1837).

 

[amolitor]

There are two different rules of thirds. I happen to own a copy of that book, and all he's talking about is proportions. When you're whacking something up into "a major part and a smaller part" thirds is, very roughly, about where you want to go.

 

[Derrel]

Photographers worry about "where do I stick the subject?" Painters don't.

It depends what or how you paint, sure there's plenty of modern and contemporary artists who pretty much throw paint onto a canvas randomly but for more disciplined work composition is an important element and painters do indeed worry about it.

Not really, no, not in the sense that I mean. The painting is not divided up into "the subject" and "all that crud in the background, the stuff that's not the subject, oh bother what am I going to do about that". Photographers tend to think of the things in the frame as:

- the thing I am taking a picture of (the Subject)
- everything else

To a painter, the "subject" is everything in the frame. If it's not part of the subject of the painting, you simply don't put it in the frame. There may be a primary object of interest, say the sitter for a portrait, but the stuff in the frame around that sitter is generally designed to support that main object of interest. You can certainly say "well, the sitter is the subject" but there's no denying that whatever you call these things, there are two rather different points of view in play here. I have no wish to argue over what the word "subject" shall mean. Feel free to substitute "Fragnap" for my meaning of "subject" if you like. The rule of thirds then tells you were to place the Fragnap.

Painters do not see the problem of composition as one of "where shall I stick the primary interesting object", in general. The problem of composition is one of designing the entire frame, including most interesting object if any, and subordinate objects. Placement of subordinate objects and masses relative to the primary one, for instance, is a problem of great import to the painter, it's an actually important problem that needs to be solved to make a good picture. Things like the RoT, Golden Triangle, etc, sweep these kinds of actually important problems under the rug in favor of the relatively trivial "where shall I stick the subject".

Of course there are exceptions. There are probably painters who, perhaps, paint absolutely true to life, for whom "background" is synonymous with "stuff I have to deal with that isn't the main object" but these are the exception rather than the rule.

Speaking of exceptions: there is a HUGE difference between western viewers of photographs, and eastern (as in Asian) viewers of photographs. When my ex-wife was studying for her doctorate in research psychology, I was exposed to some of her books on visual perception, and one of the books contained some results of studies in visual perception that compared the way western subjects actgually viewed and conceptualized photographs, based on eye movement scan records and analysis.

You wrote: "Photographers tend to think of the things in the frame as:

- the thing I am taking a picture of (the Subject)
- everything else"

Umm, YES, that is the way western viewers look at photos. Asian viewers, and as I recall Asian-Americans (!!!) tend to look FIRST, as in FIRST, at the BACKGROUND, and then use repeated eye movements and cognitive analysis effort to place the "subject" within the contenxt of TIHE BACKGROUND. Wow....what a mind-fry,eh? This is a subject I found fascinating. ANd there might actually be some genetic hard-wiring in this. As an aside, witness Asian (Japanese and ChHinese,specifically) landscape painting; thousands of years BEFORE Europeans learned to draw, Asian landscape painters were painting landscapes that used the phenomenon of aerial perspective, to convey distance and depth and dimensionality. THOUSANDS of years later, Europe's top level painters were still drawing charcoal outlines around their figures, and could not even figure out how to draw a vanishing point...

While much of Europe was warring and starving and in a dark age, the eastern cultures were exploring the arts and thriving...

Anyway..."western" viewers FIRST focus on the foreground, with very little background study....Asian viewers on the other hand,look at photos and images in an almost diametrically opposed manner.

 

[AlanKlein]

Anyway..."western" viewers FIRST focus on the foreground, with very little background study....Asian viewers on the other hand,look at photos and images in an almost diametrically opposed manner.

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find anything like that in Google but did find this. Difference Between Chinese Painting and Western Painting

 

[somberg]

Anyway..."western" viewers FIRST focus on the foreground, with very little background study....Asian viewers on the other hand,look at photos and images in an almost diametrically opposed manner.

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find anything like that in Google but did find this. Difference Between Chinese Painting and Western Painting

There are actuallly a number of studies that show eye movement differences across cultures.

Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception is an example. See also Eye tracking reveals cultural differences in eye movements. | Eye-Com Research

 

[Ilovemycam]

When to break it?

...when it works.

 

[Derrel]

Anyway..."western" viewers FIRST focus on the foreground, with very little background study....Asian viewers on the other hand,look at photos and images in an almost diametrically opposed manner.

Do you have a source for that? I couldn't find anything like that in Google but did find this. Difference Between Chinese Painting and Western Painting

Alan, you might contact Dr. Maggie Shiffrar, at Rutgers (Newark) about this subject area. Rutgers University - Newark Campus, Department of Psychology

 

[AlanKlein]

Somberg: Those were interesting studies that confirmed what Derrel said. It seems that Chinese cultural relations tend to have them look at the composition as a whole with both foreground and background. Part of their cultural need to see what's going on in relationships with other humans. Westerners on the other hand with more of a "free spirit" viewpoints, and less concern with others, get to the heart of the matter first focusing more time on the foreground. I'm not quite sure how that relates to photos each group favor. Maybe there were studies on that too.

 

[Derrel]

Alan: I find it interesting that the Japanese language had a word for the character of the out-of-focus portions of photographs. The word is boke. The word was first introduced to America by Mike Johnston, in some articles he wrote for an American photography magazine in the early 1990's. He added an h to the end, to come up with the Americanized version of the word, "bokeh". Prior to that time, there was basically NO discussion of the out of focus background (and foreground) rendering characteristics of specific lenses. I recall being involved in on-line photography fora back in the mdi-1990's and late 1990's; long-time American commercial and professional photographers often were HORRIBLY dismissive of bokeh, and often insisted there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO IT! (in about that much emphasis...very vehement dismissal was the norm among a substantial segment of "old pro's").

What I find interesting is that most of those "old pro" shooters often shot Hasselblad 500-series cameras with inter-lens shutters, and many of the lenses in that system had absolutely $hitty, abysmally jarring bokeh rendering--BUT,m since those guys shot on seamless paper so much, there really was, in effect "NO background" in many of the images they had been making for decades. It was amusing to here these self-importnat blowhard profess their utter,total inability to literally SEE the way lenses rendered out of focus areas...these guys loudly and proudly shouted about their ignorance of something obvious.

Again...the Japanese photo culture was clearly aware of background rendering, while western culture was pretty much oblivious to it....when your culture does not even have a WORD for something, I think the chances are high that your culture is ignorant of the effect...

 

[amolitor]

see also: Linguistic relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia