Please help me understand your comments. I did a little research online and could not find a "different" rule of thirds. Saw quite a few articles where they laid the 9 square grid over classical art and showed how classical artists used the rule of thirds. Also saw how artists from the time of Michelangelo used grids to help get proportions right. Wikipedia shows the Golden Ratio goes back to 2400 years. Where did I go wrong? I know I studied the Golden Ratio as a young engineer, which was well before the internet era. We used dial up acoustic couplers and AOL was text based. DOS was the operating system.
See:
The Rule of Thirds--Where did it come from?
A LOT of modern B.S. has been labelled as "truth" in the internet era. The "rule of thirds" was an landscape painting theory in the 1700's,which involved NO "grid", no overlaying, but was,initially, about using 1/3 foreground, 1/3 mid-ground, and 1/3 sky or distant background. until it was first used and called
The Rule of Thirds,in the "modern era' in a 1969
Popular Mechanics (yes, you read that correctly) how-to blurb. Same with the so-called "exposure triangle'" a, modern,
internet-era creation. The Golden Ratio has been around a long time. BUT, applying it to photographic composition is largely an i
nternet-era thing.
Laying a grid pattern, or anything else, over classical paintings or photos..often times the results are hilarious. Real scholarship on these topics is difficult in the era of Bing, and Google, which give a lot of weight to new, on-line BS that has is little more than modern 20th or 21st century laymen or novices, parroting what they think to be "true",and hitting the "upload" button.
"A lie repeated often enough becomes accepted as truth."
Wikipedia..is FILLED with errors and is "edited" by many people with VERY dubious qualifications. Wikipedia is under constant revision,and one needs no qualification to revise Wikipedia entries.[/QUOTE]
Thanks for helping me understand. After some more readings I found a quote on Pentax Forums by Mattdm on 2/28/2011 that i like:
"But, whether the ancients or the Renaissance masters used the formula is pretty strongly in the realm of unprovable speculation. What's demonstrable is that the idea of looking for from those artists is something that came into vogue in 19th century Germany, when the idea of such a secret harmony appealed strongly to the philosophical fashion of the time. And it isn't until the 20th century that we have artists unambiguously intentionally using the golden ratio in composition."
