Project: Photo // Rule of Thirds

I'm the girl who takes hundreds of pictures... but very sparingly posts on social media.

That's odd, right? Where the pictures go? Well, they mostly find a home in my iPhone's trash album.

I can't say what makes a good picture, but I do recognize the bad ones, so it's pretty easy to weed them out. Problem is, I hardly end up with anything I'm happy with...

And so begins Project: Photo!

I'm attempting to learn some basic photography rules that I can practice with, by shooting at least one picture every day. (But please, no judgement. This is just for fun!)

This week, I found that many basic rules were kind of intuitive, but one thing I'd never heard of was the Rule of Thirds.

Rule of thirds is a guideline that divides an image into 3 equal parts horizontally and 3 equal parts vertically. The important elements are positioned along the lines or at the intersecting spots, which creates visual interest and balances the composition... more so than a "centered" subject.

And that's what became this week's task!

The four focal points are where the light emanates out from behind the clouds. When taking this picture, I was trying to wait for the big ugly tow truck in front of us to get out of range, but it became an interesting subject in the shadows of the foreground.

Salsa class! I put the girl with the gold shoes at the second vertical line. True enough, my eyes directly go toward her.

This was my favorite. It started out as a picture of the palm tree, but after cropping with rule of thirds and putting a black and white filter on it to eliminate distracting colors, I realized that the subject of the photo was actually the sun... and the tree became a silhouette. Here is the original picture for comparison.

On Sunday, we went to Lake Killarney for some stand up paddle boarding (SUP) and I put my iPhone in this waterproof plastic pocket to take pictures. Sadly, all the pictures came out slightly fuzzy and dull, so I couldn't use them for this project. Regardless, I used the upper third horizontal line for the horizon and the bottom third horizontal line for the chairs in the foreground.

Thoughts:

1. Jeez, I've got a lot more work to do!
2. Walk further away. Smaller subjects are much easier to crop to the rule of thirds.
3. Shadows are something my eyes completely ignore in real life. Until I see them in photos. (This would be a good exercise for a future week.)
4. If I had a dog, I'd name him Voldemort. Oh... but also, walking him would be a good excuse to spend more time outside, thereby providing me with more things to take pictures of.