make up photog tip for this week~"the rule of two thirds”

 

this week we are going to talk about "the rule of two thirds". one of the most BORING things you can do is to take a picture with your subject dead center like the one below:

it’s our natural tendency to want to place our subjects perfectly center in our photographs, but doing so is actually very unappealing to the eye.

if you think of a tic-tac-toe board, when taking your photos, you want to ideally place your subject at any point where the horizontal line meets the vertical line. you can see these points marked by a star in my beautiful diagram below:

clearly i am NOT an artist as you can see i can’t even draw a straight line—ha! you get the point though.

here is the same picture with the subject off-center:

and this was from before, so you can see them closer together.

here’s another example:

centered:

off-centered:

see how there’s something “uncomfortable” about the subject being completely centered?

i always attempt to take all of my pictures with the subject placed appropriately off center, but now with technology, you don’t even have to stress about that during your photo shoot! we are able to crop photos in the post processing stage to move our subjects to the ideal points.

speaking of, there are many basic photo editing programs out there—i currently use photoshop elements and i love it, but will be upgrading in the future to lightroom. i only recommend these programs if you are serious enough to take quite a bit of time studying how to use them or else you will become very frustrated and will waste your money.

you don’t need these programs to do basic photo editing!picasa, is a great FREE program you can download that provides many basic editing functions such as cropping.